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.