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Kaqchikel Chronicles
701 pages, 8 1/2 x 11
Hardcover
Release Date:01 Aug 2006
ISBN:9780292712706
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Kaqchikel Chronicles

The Definitive Edition

University of Texas Press

The collection of documents known as the Kaqchikel Chronicles consists of rare highland Maya texts, which trace Kaqchikel Maya history from their legendary departure from Tollan/Tula through their migrations, wars, the Spanish invasion, and the first century of Spanish colonial rule. The texts represent a variety of genres, including formal narrative, continuous year-count annals, contribution records, genealogies, and land disputes.

While the Kaqchikel Chronicles have been known to scholars for many years, this volume is the first and only translation of the texts in their entirety. The book includes two collections of documents, one known as the Annals of the Kaqchikels and the other as the Xpantzay Cartulary. The translation has been prepared by leading Mesoamericanists in collaboration with Kaqchikel-speaking linguistic scholars. It features interlinear glossing, which allows readers to follow the translators in the process of rendering colonial Kaqchikel into modern English. Extensive footnoting within the text restores the depth and texture of cultural context to the Chronicles. To put the translations in context, Judith Maxwell and Robert Hill have written a full scholarly introduction that provides the first modern linguistic discussion of the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic structure of sixteenth-century Kaqchikel. The translators also tell a lively story of how these texts, which derive from pre-contact indigenous pictographic and cartographic histories, came to be converted into their present form.

Judith M. Maxwell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Robert M. Hill II is Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University.

  • Acknowledgments
  • Key to the Abbreviations of Grammatical Categories Used in the Interlinear Glosses
  • Part One. Introduction and Linguistic Commentary
    • Chapter 1. Background
      • The Kaqchikel and Mesoamerica
      • Composition of the Iximche' Polity
      • The Kaqchikel and Their Neighbors
      • Rulers
      • After the Invasion
    • Chapter 2. The Documents
      • The Indigenous Writing Tradition
      • The Annals of the Cakchiquels
      • The Xpantzay Cartulary
    • Chapter 3. Linguistic Commentary
      • The Writing System
      • Translation Format
      • Tropes of the Maya Literary Canon
      • Lexical Change
      • Colonial Kaqchikel Grammar
      • Nahuatl Influence
      • Conclusion
    • Chapter 4. The Translation Project and Politics
      • Limitations of Earlier Translations
      • Ideology of Translation
      • Mechanics of This Translation Project
      • Fruits of the Collaboration
    • Charts
      • 1. Ajpo Xajil
      • 2. Ajpo Sotz'il
      • 3. Ajaw Xpantzay
      • 4. Combined Rulers
      • 5. Kaqchikel Winäq
    • Bibliography
  • Part Two. The Chronicles
    • Spanish Map of Xpantzay Lands
    • The "Annals"
      • Xajil Chronicle
      • Pakal Documents
      • Q'ebut Genealogy
      • Q'eqak'üch Genealogy
      • The Don Pedro Elías Martín Chronicle
      • Accounts of Disputes, 1580s-1591
      • Contribution Records
      • Marriages of Francisco Díaz
    • The Xpantzay Cartulary
      • Lands and Boundaries of the Xpantzay
      • Origins and Lands of the Xpantzay
      • The Complaint
      • The Xpantzay Genealogy by Alonso Pérez
      • The Xpantzay Genealogy by Felipe Vásquez
      • Wars of the Sotz'il and the Tuquche'
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