Yucatan

Yucatan is a flat limestone shelf with no surface rivers, and its religion is shaped by that geology. Rainwater drains straight through the rock into an underground water table, reachable where the roof of a cavern has collapsed into a natural well, and those wells, cenotes, were treated as openings into the underworld and as the domain of the rain deity. Objects and human remains have been dredged from several, most famously from the large cenote at Chichen Itza.

Maya religion here is documented better than most of the pre-Columbian Americas because it was written down twice, in two scripts. The first is the Maya script itself, a full writing system combining logograms and syllabic signs, carved on monuments and painted in folding bark-paper books. Only four of those books survive, and they are almanacs and astronomical tables rather than narratives: the Dresden codex contains a Venus table of considerable accuracy and eclipse tables.

The second is alphabetic. After the conquest, Maya scribes wrote their own language in the Latin alphabet, producing the books of Chilam Balam, town by town, which mix prophecy, history, ritual and medicine and preserve material from before contact alongside material from after it.

The Long Count calendar, which places every day in a continuous tally from a fixed origin, is the reason Maya inscriptions can be dated to the day, and it made the region's chronology the firmest in the Americas.

The single most important source for Yucatec Maya religion was written by the man most responsible for destroying the evidence, and that paradox governs how the subject is studied.

Diego de Landa, a Franciscan who arrived in Yucatan in 1549, conducted an inquiry into continuing idolatry among converts in 1562, using torture, and burned a quantity of Maya books and images at Mani. He was recalled to Spain to answer for exceeding his authority, was cleared, and later returned as bishop. During or after that period he compiled an account of Yucatec life, the Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan, which describes the calendar, the ceremonies of the year, the gods, agricultural practice, and the script.

His attempt at the script was wrong in method and decisive in effect. He asked an informant for the letters of the Maya alphabet and wrote down the signs given, producing what is in fact a list of syllables. For four centuries that list was read as a failed alphabet and dismissed; when Yuri Knorozov in the 1950s treated it as syllabic instead, it became the key to decipherment, and the Maya script is now largely readable.

So the surviving books were burned by the author of the document that made the surviving inscriptions legible. The atlas records both facts together, because reading Landa without the first is how his account came to be trusted uncritically for so long.