Pictograph to Alphabet -- and Back

The Xajil chronicle of the Kaqchikel Maya of Guatemala is topically the most diverse, lengthy, and organizationally complex of the surviving highland-Maya historical texts that were first recorded alphabetically in the colonial period. In this monograph, the author demonstrates that much of the Chronicle was redacted from pre-conquest pictographic documents, documents that now are lost. Both the organization and topical coverage allow the author to identify the specific genres of the pictographic originals and to characterize the content of pre-conquest historical “archives,” as well as gauge the amount of information contained in such documents, which would necessarily have been committed to memory by indigenous historians. Illus.