Yucatan Before and After the Conquest

Yucatan Before and After the Conquest is one of the most remarkable and controversial accounts of the encounter between the Spanish conquerors and the Maya world.
Written by Diego de Landa, the Franciscan friar and later bishop of Yucatán, this work offers a vivid description of the land, customs, religion, calendar, rituals, social organization, and daily life of the Maya people in the sixteenth century. At once a historical document, an ethnographic testimony, and a window into a lost civilization, it remains an essential source for anyone seeking to understand pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the dramatic transformations brought by the Spanish conquest.
Landa’s text is especially important because it preserves precious information about Maya beliefs, ceremonies, writing, and chronology—details that might otherwise have disappeared forever. Yet it is also marked by the contradictions of its author: the same man who recorded invaluable knowledge of Maya culture also played a role in the destruction of many Maya manuscripts and religious objects.
This tension gives the book its enduring power. It is not only a chronicle of conquest, but also a complex testimony to cultural encounter, loss, violence, memory, and survival.
For historians, students, and general readers interested in the Maya, the Spanish conquest, colonial history, and the origins of modern Yucatán, Yucatan Before and After the Conquest remains an indispensable classic.

Diego de Landa (1524–1579) was a Spanish Franciscan friar, missionary, and later bishop of Yucatán. He is best known for his work Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, also known as Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, one of the most important early accounts of Maya civilization. Landa arrived in Yucatán in the sixteenth century and studied the language, customs, religion, calendar, and social life of the Maya. His writings preserved valuable information about Maya culture that might otherwise have been lost. At the same time, he remains a deeply controversial figure because he was responsible for the destruction of many Maya manuscripts, idols, and religious objects during campaigns against native religious practices. For this reason, Diego de Landa is remembered both as a crucial witness to Maya civilization and as one of the figures involved in the cultural devastation that followed the Spanish conquest of the Americas.