Pokom Maya and Their Colonial Dictionaries

The Copies and Further Work with the Documents

The original of Document #5 is in the manuscript collections of the University of Pennsylvania. It is in very poor condition. Some pages are incomplete, others are missing. The original manuscript has not been seen by Feldman. Instead he worked with copy flow from microfilm made thirty years ago from a copy of photographic copy by William Gates in the Peabody Museum Library of Harvard University. Suzanne Miles felt that Document #5 was a colonial era manuscript and thought that she could see resemblance in the handwriting with Zúñiga autographed copies of sermons. However it also must be noted that the document at the University of Pennsylvania also has the signature of a Luis Rojas, "Dominican friar and parish priest" of San Cristóbal Cahcoh and bears the date of February 14, 1875 on its title page. The same title page notes that the document was then in "fragmentos."

The assumption has been that Moran used Document #5 to prepare Document #3 but it remains possible that he either used a different version or omitted portions of #3. This assumption needs to be confirmed. Therefore I recommend that a careful study be made of letters A through N in document #5 and any data missing from Document #3 be extracted for publication.

Document #3 was also studied from copies. In this case from photocopies of Gates photostats in the Library of Congress manuscript division and from copy flow from the same 30 year old microfilm made from the Gates copy in the Peabody Museum Library of Harvard University. Acuna (1991: xv) notes that the original is Ms. HHB [M-M 444] of the Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley. I feel certain that a study of the original document, which appears to be in excellent condition, will clarify portions that have become obscured through the copying process.

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