These people also used certain characters or letters, with which they wrote in their books about the antiquities and their sciences. We found a great number of books in these letters, and since they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devils we burned them all, which they took most grievously, and which gave them great pain.
So writes Friar Diego de Landa in his Relación de las cosas de Yucatan of 1566, the basic book in Maya studies. Landa did all he could to wipe out Maya culture and civilization. In the famous auto-da-fé of July 1562 at Mani, as he tells us, he destroyed 5,000 "idols" and burned 27 hieroglyphic rolls. Paradoxically, Landa's book, written in self-defense against charges of despotic mismanagement, is the the only significant account of Yucatan from the early post-Conquest era. As the distinguished Maya scholar William Gates states in his introduction, "ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know...