At the time of the Spanish conquest, Ch’olti’ was spoken throughout much of the southern Maya lowlands in what is present-day Petén and Chiquimula, and is closely related to that spoken by the authors of the Classic Maya inscriptions. This book presents for the first time a facsimile, transcription, English and Spanish translation, and grammatical analysis of the Morán Manuscript, a Colonial-era document that provides the sole attestation of Ch’olti’. In addition to its value as a chronicle of the Colonial period, the Morán Manuscript is crucial to our understanding of the Classic Maya, particularly their language, captured in thousands of intricately carved and painted hieroglyphic inscriptions. Robertson, Law, and Haertel, regarded as the ablest interpreters of Ch’olti’ now working in Mayan linguistics, provide not only a painstaking presentation of language data but also a detailed history of the manuscript itself. They discuss the document’s probable authorship, investigate where and by whom Ch’olti’ was spoken at contact, and infer how speakers maintained their expressive capabilities in the face of colonial oppression. The transcribed Ch’olti’ texts feature an orthographically standardized version with a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, a literal English translation that preserves many of the poetic structures and metaphors, and a flowing translation in both English and Spanish. The publication of this document marks a major contribution to the fields of Maya epigraphy, Mayan linguistics, ethnohistory, and Mesoamerican languages. It will serve as the definitive presentation of the Morán Manuscript and stand as a major contribution to further understanding the language of the Maya inscriptions in Mexico and Guatemala.

New Perspectives in Mayan Linguistics is a collection of papers synthesizing the research on Mayan languages at the beginning of the 21st century. One of the most prominent features of the articles included in this book is the balance between the use of the most recent linguistic theories and the empirical data from which analyses are drawn. A definitive characteristic of the book is that all of the papers provide rich and new descriptive material gathered in the field by their respective authors. The findings reported in this book have implications for a deeper understanding not only of particular aspects of the individual grammars of the Mayan family, but might have consequences for linguistic theory as well as for typological and universal generalizations. The volume brings together linguists of diverse areas of specialization phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, epigraphy, lexicography and anthropological linguistics to discuss recent analyses and data from a variety of Mayan languages. For its broad scope summarizing the recent methodologies, theoretical models and findings of research in Mayan languages, the volume is of particular interest to the academic community at large, including researchers, teachers and students alike.

By 1,800 years ago, speakers of proto-Ch’olan, the ancestor of three present-day Maya languages, had developed a calendar of eighteen twenty-day months plus a set of five days for a total of 365 days. This original Maya calendar, used extensively during the Classic period (200–900 CE), recorded in hieroglyphic inscriptions the dates of dynastic and cosmological importance. Over time, and especially after the Mayas’ contact with Europeans, the month names that had originated with these inscriptions developed into fourteen distinct traditions, each connected to a different ethnic group. Today, the glyphs encompass 250 standard forms, variants, and alternates, with about 570 meanings among all the cognates, synonyms, and homonyms. In The Maya Calendar, Weldon Lamb collects, defines, and correlates the month names in every recorded Maya calendrical tradition from the first hieroglyphic inscriptions to the present—an undertaking critical to unlocking and understanding the iconography and cosmology of the ancient Maya world. Mining data from astronomy, ethnography, linguistics, and epigraphy, and working from early and modern dictionaries of the Maya languages, Lamb pieces together accurate definitions of the month names in order to compare them across time and tradition. His exhaustive process reveals unsuspected parallels. Three-fourths of the month names, he shows, still derive from those of the original hieroglyphic inscriptions. Lamb also traces the relationship between month names as cognates, synonyms, or homonyms, and then reconstructs each name’s history of development, connecting the Maya month names in several calendars to ancient texts and archaeological finds. In this landmark study, Lamb’s investigations afford new insight into the agricultural, astronomical, ritual, and even political motivations behind names and dates in the Maya calendar. A history of descent and diffusion, of unexpected connectedness and longevity, The Maya Calendar offers readers a deep understanding of a foundational aspect of Maya culture.

The first book to focus on the multifaceted images of deer and hunting in ancient Maya art, from the award-winning author of To Be Like Gods: Dance in Ancient Maya Civilization. Winner, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2019 The white-tailed deer had a prominent status in Maya civilization: it was the most important wild-animal food source at many inland Maya sites and also functioned as a major ceremonial symbol. Offering an in-depth semantic analysis of this imagery, The Beast Between considers iconography, hieroglyphic texts, mythological discourses, and ritual narratives to translate the significance and meaning of the vibrant metaphors expressed in a variety of artifacts depicting deer and hunting. Charting the importance of deer as a key component of the Maya diet, especially for elites, and analyzing the coupling of deer and maize in the Maya worldview, The Beast Between reveals a close and long-term interdependence between the Maya and these animals. Not only are deer depicted naturalistically in hunting and ritual scenes, but also they are assigned human attributes. This rich imagery reflects the many ways in which deer hunting was linked to status, sexuality, and war as part of a deeper process to ensure the regeneration of both agriculture and ancestry. Drawing on methodologies of art history, archaeology, and ethnology, this illuminating work is poised to become a key resource for multiple fields.

Language-contact phenomena in Mesoamerica and adjacent regions present an exciting field for research that has the potential to significantly contribute to our understanding of language contact and the role that it plays in language change. This volume presents and analyzes fresh empirical data from living and/or extinct Mesoamerican languages (from the Mayan, Uto-Aztecan, Totonac-Tepehuan and Otomanguean groups), neighboring non-Mesoamerican languages (Apachean, Arawakan, Andean languages), as well as Spanish. Language-contact effects in these diverse languages and language groups are typically analyzed by different subfields of linguistics that do not necessarily interact with one another. It is hoped that this volume, which contains works from different scholarly traditions that represent a variety of approaches to the study of language contact, will contribute to the lessening of this compartmentalization. The volume is relevant to researchers of language contact and contact-induced change and to anyone interested both in the historical development and present features of indigenous languages of the Americas and Latin American Spanish.

Mesoamerican communities past and present are characterized by their strong inclination toward color and their expert use of the natural environment to create dyes and paints. In pre-Hispanic times, skin was among the preferred surfaces on which to apply coloring materials. Archaeological research and historical and iconographic evidence show that, in Mesoamerica, the human body—alive or dead—received various treatments and procedures for coloring it. Painting the Skin brings together exciting research on painted skins in Mesoamerica. Chapters explore the materiality, uses, and cultural meanings of the colors applied to a multitude of skins, including bodies, codices made of hide and vegetal paper, and even building “skins.” Contributors offer physicochemical analysis and compare compositions, manufactures, and attached meanings of pigments and colorants across various social and symbolic contexts and registers. They also compare these Mesoamerican colors with those used in other ancient cultures from both the Old and New Worlds. This cross-cultural perspective reveals crucial similarities and differences in the way cultures have painted on skins of all types. Examining color in Mesoamerica broadens understandings of Native religious systems and world views. Tracing the path of color use and meaning from pre-Columbian times to the present allows for the study of the preparation, meanings, social uses, and thousand-year origins of the coloring materials used by today’s Indigenous peoples. Contributors: María Isabel Álvarez Icaza Longoria Christine Andraud Bruno Giovanni Brunetti David Buti Davide Domenici Élodie Dupey García Tatiana Falcón Álvarez Anne Genachte-Le Bail Fabrice Goubard Aymeric Histace Patricia Horcajada Campos Stephen Houston Olivia Kindl Bertrand Lavédrine Linda R. Manzanilla Naim Anne Michelin Costanza Miliani Virgina E. Miller Sélim Natahi Fabien Pottier Patricia Quintana Owen Franco D. Rossi Antonio Sgamellotti Vera Tiesler Aurélie Tournié María Luisa Vázquez de Ágredos Pascual Cristina Vidal Lorenzo

The Mayan Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the language family associated with the Classic Mayan civilization (AD 200–900), a family whose individual languages are still spoken today by at least six million indigenous Maya in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. This unique resource is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mayan languages and linguistics. Written by a team of experts in the field, The Mayan Languages presents in-depth accounts of the linguistic features that characterize the thirty-one languages of the family, their historical evolution, and the social context in which they are spoken. The Mayan Languages: provides detailed grammatical sketches of approximately a third of the Mayan languages, representing most of the branches of the family; includes a section on the historical development of the family, as well as an entirely new sketch of the grammar of "Classic Maya" as represented in the hieroglyphic script; provides detailed state-of-the-art discussions of the principal advances in grammatical analysis of Mayan languages; includes ample discussion of the use of the languages in social, conversational, and poetic contexts. Consisting of topical chapters on the history, sociolinguistics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse structure, and acquisition of the Mayan languages, this book will be a resource for researchers and other readers with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language acquisition, and linguistic typology.

This book offers a study of long-term, intensive language contact between more than a dozen Mayan languages spoken in the lowlands of Guatemala, Southern Mexico and Belize. It details the massive restructuring of syntactic and semantic organization, the calquing of grammatical patterns, and the direct borrowing of inflectional morphology, including, in some of these languages, the direct borrowing of even entire morphological paradigms. The in-depth analysis of contact among the genetically related Lowland Mayan languages presented in this volume serves as a highly relevant case for theoretical, historical, contact, typological, socio- and anthropological linguistics. This linguistically complex situation involves serious engagement with issues of methods for distinguishing contact-induced similarity from inherited similarity, the role of social and ideological variables in conditioning the outcomes of language contact, cross-linguistic tendencies in language contact, as well as the effect that inherited similarity can have on the processes and outcomes of language contact.

The history of relations between the Spanish and the Indians of colonial Central America, often oversimplified as a story of unending Spanish abuse, forms a complicated tapestry of economics and politics. Robert W. Patch's even-handed study of the repartimientode mercancías—the commercial dealings between regional magistrates and the people under their jurisdiction—reveals the inner workings of colonialism in Central America. Indians were at the heart of the colonial economy. They made up the majority of the population, produced most of the goods, and performed most of the labor. The bureaucrats who ruled over them were badly paid, and to increase their income, they carried out illegal business activities with the Indians and sometimes even non-Indians. This book analyzes these commercial exchanges in colonial Central America within the context of a colonial regime dependent for income on taxes paid by Indians. Patch demonstrates that the magistrates frequently used repartimientos illegally to facilitate tax collection and then justified their actions by claiming that such commerce was necessary for the survival of colonialism. At the same time, the commerce contributed to the development of regional economies and the integration of the regions into the world economy. Patch’s case studies of highland Guatemala and Nicaragua reveal how the system worked at the regional and local levels. These studies manifest not only the profits to be made through repartimientos but also the problems faced by magistrates as they tried to be government officials and businessmen at the same time. The Spanish government eventually imposed reforms to make the colonial bureaucracy more honest by eliminating the repartimiento system. The reforms, however, also resulted in economic decline and political disaffection among the Hispanic population. Patch’s book, therefore, covers a crucial phase in the history of Central America as the region moved from colonialism to independence.