Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Hunting is part of the biocultural heritage of the Maya people of the Yucatán Peninsula because it has been part of their strategy of multiple use of resources and their cosmovision since pre-Hispanic times. The study of knowledge and practices on the uses of natural resources can help to improve the resilience of biological and human communities to disturbances. The aim of this study was to characterize the biocultural knowledge associated with traditional hunting in the Mayan community of Xul, Yucatán. From September to December 2020, 42 mixed questionnaires and seven semi-structured interviews were applied to local hunters. It was found that 23 species of vertebrates (35 mammals, 6 birds, and 1 reptile) are hunted in Xul and are used mainly for food. The species with higher cultural importance (IIC) were the red brocket deer (Mazama temama), collared peccary (Pecari tajacu), and ocellated turkey (Meleagris ocellata). The dry season is their favorite season for hunting (71.4 %) and hunters prefer the milpa (92.9 %) and forest (83.3 %) as hunting sites. The most practiced techniques are the “batida” (flushing by hunting teams, p’uuj; 92.9 %), “caminar por el monte” (walking through the woods, xíimbal ts’on; 73.8 %), and “lampareo” (hunting with flashlights, ts’on; 69 %). In Xul there are beliefs such as virtues, the Owners of animals and the winds (Ik’). These results show the continuity of biocultural knowledge related to hunting and its importance in the management and conservation of wild fauna in rural communities. 

The study and description of toponyms is one of the oldest topics in linguistics (Levinson, 2003) and philology. It is an area of study that explains the history of a region and describes topographical features of the landscape. Place names encode multiple pieces of information that a linguistic and anthropological analysis helps to reveal. The objective of this article is to describe the toponyms of the Yucatec Maya of Kopchen, Quintana Roo, focusing on their meanings through the description of their lexical-morphological and phonological properties. The ethnography of communication (Gumperz and Hymes 1964) is used here, employing semi-structured interviews for the elaboration of the corpus. This article shows that the morphemes that form the native Mayan toponyms reveal information directly related to the place, in contrast to the toponyms that come from Spanish. All toponyms are multimorphemic; lexical morphemes refer to different categories of words. The head of a toponym was crucial in determining endocentric constructions and exocentric constructions. Morphologically, only the feminine gender or individualizing mark (i)x and the suffix -il are observed in toponyms. However, at the clausal level there are more inflectional morphemes in toponyms. Phonologically, toponyms borrowed from Spanish adapt to the phonological rules of Yucatec Maya with vowel lengthening and then receiving tones. The loanwords become more and more complex according to the different productions of the speakers. This articlereveals several points that help the literature in general to broaden its knowledge about toponymy.

The manuscript informally known as “Título del barrio de Santa Ana” was created in 1565 in San Cristóbal Verapaz, Guatemala. It is written in the Poqomchi’ language (Mayan family, K’iche’ano subgroup) and relates some events during the first decades after the Dominican missionaries arrived. It is a title of ownership, a specific genre of indigenous documents that was elaborated in Mesoamerica with the purpose to obtain a tool to defend the historical rights over certain territories. This paper presents the main characteristics of the “Título del barrio de Santa Ana” and highlights its importance for historical and linguistic studies. Based on a comparative analysis with other indigenous documents written in the Highlands of Guatemala during the colonial period, it is argued that the “Título del barrio de Santa Ana” initiated the Maya-Poqomchi’ literary tradition.

In this article the contents of page 3 of the Chilam Balam of Kaua and its parallel passages are approached in a comprehensive manner with the objective of reaching a better understanding of the disease discussed here, the am can mo ik tamcas. The text is studied, proposing a new translation, and the different interpretations that can be made of it are discussed. Its image is analyzed and a visual link with the image of the bird and the serpent of the medieval Beatus is proposed. Finally, the text-image relationship and the information it provides us with are discussed.

The ‘arrival’ of Lady Six Sky in ad 682 has long been recognized as a pivotal turning point in the history of Naranjo, marking the rekindling of the dynasty. The fact that all references to this event are retrospective highlights the diplomatic recourses employed and charisma of Lady Six Sky, which ultimately enabled her to assert herself as regent to the young K’ahk’ Tiliiw Chan Chaahk. Despite such a promising revival, this prolonged regency was inevitably followed by a series of short and mostly unstable reigns. Here we will focus on the legacy of Lady Six Sky’s political activity and re-evaluate the identity of Yax Mayuy Chan Chaahk and K’ahk’ Yipiiy Chan Chaahk. We will attempt to determine whether these were consanguineal relatives, as offspring or younger siblings of K’ahk’ Tiliiw, or high-standing members of the court.

The natural properties of the Eastern Coast of Quintana Roo provided the conditions to achieve the subsistence of human groups through the exploitation of the geographical environment. An example of this is the presence of shell elements in Xcaret and Playa del Carmen, which underwent a formal, functional and technological analysis to determine their characteristics and to get closer to understanding the development and interaction of these societies with their environment and other human groups. This research identified a pattern of use of the species, the existence of a relationship between raw material and type of object and local production, as has been determined for some sites in the area; thus suggesting, belonging to the same regional tradition.

From the descriptions made by explorers and archaeologists of Palenque since the mid-nineteenth century, the idea that the spaces for the dead maintained presence and relevance scarcely reported for other Maya cities is outlined. The image that the city showed to its inhabitants and visitors was that of an omnipresence of spaces for the cult of the dead. This is evident in the mortuary chambers with sarcophagi inside, built on the facades of an important number of structures in the monumental area and the peripheral complexes. The intention of this article is to rescue that image of Palenque in which the spaces to render cult to the dead were part of its identity.

El Tintal’s occupation lasted from approximately 600 BCE through 900-1000 CE. During this millennium and a half the settlement underwent two significant cultural apogees: one in the Late Preclassic Period (350 BCE-200 CE) and the second in the Late Classic Period (550-800 CE). Results from recent investigations shed light on particular cultural manifestations for each period and their correspondence to regional traditions and sociopolitical contexts. For example, in Preclassic times emphasis was placed on large, volumetric constructions that defined the cultural and ceremonial landscapes, whereas in the Classic Period there was a notable increase in structure density and territorial extension of the settlement. Here, we summarize these results with the objective of providing a diachronic perspective on the archaeology of El Tintal, a site that has remained largely unknown.

En este artículo se presentan los resultados de la investigación interdisciplinaria que abarca la conservación, las excavaciones arqueológicas y los estudios etnográficos, etnomusicológicos e históricos sobre los murales coloniales documentados en las casas de los mayas ixiles de Chajul (Guatemala). Los murales de Chajul son únicos por varias razones. En primer lugar, se documentaron en lo que ahora son casas particulares de varias familias de la comunidad, mientras que la mayoría de los ejemplos de arte colonial en América Latina se encuentran en iglesias y conventos. Además, mientras que estas últimas se centran en temas propios de la religión cristiana, los murales de Chajul se asocian con actividades socio religiosas de las confraternidades locales establecidas aquí tras la conquista española, llamadas cofradías, cuyos miembros eran indígenas. Como demostramos en este artículo, las pinturas murales de Chajul representan danzas-dramas, algunas de las cuales son locales, de origen prehispánico, mientras que otras fueron introducidas por los españoles. Los murales de Chajul constituyen una interesante fusión de tradición indígena prehispánica e influencias europeas. En esta contribución presentamos los resultados de nuestro reciente trabajo, que se centró en las labores de conservación de los murales en dos casas de Chajul, así como en excavaciones arqueológicas realizadas cerca de ellas, y en observaciones etnográficas y etnomusicológicas. Esta investigación contribuye a nuestro conocimiento sobre los mayas de las Tierras Altas durante las épocas prehispánica, colonial y moderna temprana. También enriquece nuestra comprensión acerca de las tradiciones artísticas locales indígenas y los cánones artísticos de la Mesoamérica colonial, así como sobre la persistencia de una identidad cultural de carácter mixto precolombino y europeo en esta parte de América Latina.