Encounters

The Maya met strangers long before the Spanish came. This road traces who arrived, what followed, and what the Maya kept.

1. 1502

   A trading canoe meets Columbus

   On his fourth voyage, Columbus seized a large trading canoe near the Bay Islands of Honduras. Its traders seem to have been Maya, and the meeting is often counted as the first contact between Europeans and the Maya (Library of Congress, n.d.). Not every scholar agrees the canoe was Maya (McKillop, n.d.).

2. 1562

   Books burned at Maní

   The Franciscan Diego de Landa staged an auto-da-fé at Maní, in Yucatán. Maya people were tortured, and their books were burned. Four years later he wrote an account of Yucatán that set down Maya glyphs as an alphabet (University of North Carolina Libraries, n.d.). Four Maya books are known to survive. See Writing and time.

3. 1697

   The fall of Nojpetén

   Spanish troops from Yucatán took Nojpetén, the island capital of the Itza on Lake Petén Itzá. It was the last Maya kingdom outside Spanish rule (Jones, 1998).

4. Mid 1900s

   The Bloms in Chiapas

   Frans Blom and Gertrude Duby Blom founded Na Bolom in San Cristóbal de las Casas (Bürgi, 2011). See Living Maya.

5. 1956 to 1970

   Penn at Tikal

   The University of Pennsylvania Museum ran the Tikal Project. Its records fill 134 archival boxes (Penn Museum Archives, n.d.).

Stops to come

Each needs a source before it goes on the road. Maya accounts come first where they exist.

• Teotihuacan at Tikal, AD 378. Returns in December.
• Chichén Itzá and Tula.
• Aguilar and Guerrero, shipwrecked on the Yucatán coast.
• Hernández de Córdoba and Grijalva on the Yucatán coast.
• Alvarado in highland Guatemala.
• The Montejos in Yucatán.
• Cortés crosses the Petén.
• Stephens and Catherwood, and the visitors who followed.
• The Caste War of Yucatán.
• The 1954 coup in Guatemala and the United Fruit Company (Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit, 1982).
• The war in Guatemala and its toll on Maya towns.
• Lidar and the new maps of the forest.

Sources

• Bürgi, M. (2011, June 16). Gertrude Duby-Blom. In Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz [Historical dictionary of Switzerland]. https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/022738
• Houston, S., Román Ramírez, E., Garrison, T. G., Stuart, D., Escobedo Ayala, H., & Rosales, P. (2021). A Teotihuacan complex at the Classic Maya city of Tikal, Guatemala. Antiquity, 95(384), Article e32. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2021.140
• Jones, G. D. (1998). The conquest of the last Maya kingdom. Stanford University Press. Reviewed in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 31(1), 140–141. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/15983
• Library of Congress, Federal Research Division. (n.d.). Honduras, a country study. The colonial period. https://countrystudies.us/honduras/7.htm
• McKillop, H. (n.d.). Early Maya navigation and maritime connections in Mesoamerica. In The sea in history. Boydell Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/sea-in-history-the-medieval-world/early-maya-navigation-and-maritime-connections-in-mesoamerica/0C90063D9D078FFCD8E96DEEB69229D6
• Moholy-Nagy, H. (2003). The hiatus at Tikal, Guatemala. Ancient Mesoamerica, 14(1), 77–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536103141065
• Penn Museum Archives. (n.d.). Tikal Project records. Finding aid. https://collections.penn.museum/collections/archives/findingaid/552871
• Román Ramírez, E., Paiz Aragón, L., Bass, A., Garrison, T. G., Houston, S., Hurst, H., Stuart, D., Corado Ochoa, A., García Leal, C., Scherer, A., & Piedrasanta Castellanos, R. E. (2025). A Teotihuacan altar at Tikal, Guatemala: Central Mexican ritual and elite interaction in the Maya Lowlands. Antiquity, 99(404), 462–480. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.3
• University of North Carolina Libraries. (n.d.). Diego de Landa (1524–1579), Relation des choses de Yucatan. Exhibit. https://exhibits.lib.unc.edu/exhibits/show/maya/decipherment/relation-des-choses-de-yucatan
• Wright, L. E. (2012). Immigration to Tikal, Guatemala: Evidence from stable strontium and oxygen isotopes. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 31(3), 334–352. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2012.02.001

Every source the site uses is also on the Sources page. Links checked November 6, 2026.