Landa, the Caste War and a Language Still Spoken

Yucatec is the language usually meant by plain Maya, and it is spoken by something close to three quarters of a million people today across the peninsula and into Belize, which makes it one of the strongest indigenous languages in the Americas.

The colonial record here is dominated by one man. Diego de Landa, a Franciscan and later bishop, conducted an investigation into continuing idolatry at Mani in 1562 in which people were tortured and books were burned, and then wrote an account of Yucatec life and writing that is the single most important colonial source on the Maya. His alphabet, a misunderstanding of the script that he recorded anyway, gave Yuri Knorozov the key to decipherment four centuries later. Eric Thompson's introduction to the writing represents the era before that decipherment was accepted.

The Caste War of Yucatan, beginning in 1847, was a Maya rebellion that held much of the peninsula for decades and produced its own religious institution: the cult of the speaking cross at Chan Santa Cruz, which issued orders, and whose successor shrines are still maintained by the Cruzob communities. It is a Maya Christian movement founded in the middle of a war, and it is the clearest case in the region of a religion made during a political emergency rather than inherited from before one.