In an ambitious new translation of Diego de Landa's Account of the Things of Yucatan (Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan), the editor revises and updates the language for the contemporary reader of English. In the process he captures the narrative power and intensity, the nuances and subtleties of meaning and the emotions of Landa's history of Yucatan at the time of Spanish arrival, conquest, and settlement of the peninsula. Landa's observations speak of his intellectual curiosity about and of his respect for the First Peoples of Yucatan. For instance, he credits the vast architectural legacy, from the pyramids to the monumental ceremonial centers, to the Mayas' ancestors, and not other "nations." At the same time, Landa surmises that the Maya of centuries past were healthier, better fed, and enjoyed a more diverse diet compared to the Maya of his time. This has only recently been confirmed through the analysis of human remains dating back to the Classic Maya period. These intellectual insights, however, stand in sharp contrast with Landa's conviction that the devil visited Yucatan, which led him to establish an Inquisition, for which he was denounced and made to defend himself before the Council of the Indies in Spain. This episode remains arguably the darkest one in Yucatan's post-Hispanic history. These beliefs about the presence of the devil, however, as the Salem witch trials a century later demonstrate, were common throughout the world at the time. Now, for the first time, both a new English-language translation and Landa's original Spanish-language manuscript are published in the same volume, offering readers the opportunity to read the text in both English and Spanish. This is the timeless historical work that constitutes the foundation of our understanding of the ambivalence that characterizes the co-existence of the Maya and Spaniards in Yucatan, an ambivalence that in many ways continues to the present day.

In 1562, de Landa conducted an 'Auto de fe' in Mani where in addition to 5000 'idols, ' he burned 27 books in Maya writing. This one act deprived future generations of a huge body of Mayan literature. He culturally impoverished the descendents of the Mayas, and left only four codices for scholars to puzzle over. The document translated here is de Landa's apology, and one of the few remaining contemporary texts which describe pre-conquest Mayan society, science, and art in detail. As such it must be read in context. The translator and editor, the distinguished Americanist William Gates, provides plenty of background on de Landa, the decline of the Maya, and what is today known about their ancient culture. Landa's Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan also created a valuable record of the Mayan writing system, which despite its inaccuracies was later to prove instrumental in the later decipherment of the writing system. Landa asked his informants (his primary sources were two Maya individuals descended from a ruling Maya dynasty, literate in the script) to write down the glyphic symbols corresponding to each of the letters of the (Spanish) alphabet, in the belief that there ought to be a one-to-one correspondence between them. The results were faithfully reproduced by Landa in his later account, although he recognised that the set contained apparent inconsistencies and duplicates, which he was unable to explain. Later researchers reviewing this material also formed the view that the "de Landa alphabet" was inaccurate or fanciful, and many subsequent attempts to use this transcription remained unconvincing. It was not until much later, in the mid-twentieth century, when it was realised and then confirmed that it was not a transcription of an alphabet, as Landa and others had originally supposed, but was rather a syllabary. Confirmation of this was only to be established by the work of Russian linguist Yuri Knorozov in the 1950s, and the succeeding generation of Mayanists. Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan was written by Diego de Landa Calderon circa 1566 shortly after his return to Spain after serving as Bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Yucatan in the sixteenth century. In it, de Landa catalogues a partial explanation of written and spoken language that proved vital to modern attempts to decipher the language 1] as well as Maya religion and the Mayan peoples' culture in general. It was written with the help of local Maya princes, and contains the famous translation of "I do not want to." The original manuscript has been lost, although many copies still survive. Currently available English translations include William E. Gates's 1937 translation, has been published by multiple publishing houses under the title Yucatan Before and After the Conquest