

INTRODUCTION 



In 1929 the Smithsonian Institution received from its Regent, Gen. 

 Charles G. Dawes, a fund for research in European archives, in the 

 hope of finding documents which should throw more light on the 

 early American civilizations, especially that of the Mayas. I was sent 

 abroad on this quest in October, and remained in Europe till October 

 1 93 1, filling with my notes and excerpts 12 large notebooks now at 

 the disposition of scholars in the Smithsonian, and sending long 

 monthly reports describing my finds. These reports are ready to be 

 published when funds are available. 



Most of my time was spent in Spain and Portugal ; and in the 

 Seville Archives of the Indies, thanks to a hint of Don Manuel Serrano 

 y Sanz, I came across the oldest known document of any length in 

 Maya — a village account book of San Juan de Amatitlan (Guatemala) 

 for the years 1559- 1562 ; the record of the first year is in a Pocomam 

 dialect of Maya called Achi or Ache ; the other three constitute our 

 earliest documents in Pipil. A transcript of this document is at the 

 Smithsonian Institution. But before going to Spain I visited Rome, 

 recalling that three of our finest Aztec MS came to light there; 

 I started in with the inventory of the Barberini collection in the Vati- 

 can, and came at once upon a beautifully illustrated Aztec herbal of 

 1552 (Barb. Lat. 241), which has now been published in facsimile 

 by the Johns Hopkins Press, "The Badianus MS," and the Maya 

 Society, and is to be published in Mexico City by Federico Gomez de 

 Orozco and Demetrio S. Garcia, with a Spanish commentary. 



Next to this MS under "Indies" in the inventory came, as "Anony- 

 mous," Barb. Lat. 3584 ; the compiler of the inventory remarked that 

 the name of the author did not appear, but that it would be easy to 

 identify it, since part of it was printed. The MS, beautifully bound 

 in red morocco with the Barberini bees in the corners, consists of a 

 First Part of 80 printed pages, two columns, 30^ by 2i;| cm., plus 

 79 MS folios; after a blank sheet, a Second Part with 32 similar 

 printed pages, and 194 MS folios. It proved to be a detailed itinerary 

 of Spanish America, written in 1628 or 1629; and since a chapter in 

 the printed sheets dealt with the Quichua and Aymara languages, and 

 Prof. P. Rivet, the distinguished Paris anthropologist, had asked me 

 to send him a transcript of all early documents dealing with those 

 languages, I copied the chapter and sent it to him before leaving for 



