Maya Inheritance Patterns: the Transfer of Real Estate and Personal Property in Ebtun, Yucatan, Mexico (1560-1830)

Resumen

The Titles of Ebtun (Roys 1939) is a collection of documents from the pueblo of Ebtun, Yucatan, Mexico. The documents were discovered by William Gates in 1917. Gates photographed the documents, then bad them bound and returned to Ebtun, five kilometers west of Va1lladolid. Subsequently, the photographs were acquired by the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. They were first mentioned by Tozzer in 1921 (1939:iii) and were then published by Roys, who in 1939 printed transcriptions, translations, and supplementary material. Trus material consists chiefly of 285 documents (town records of Ebtun) of which the vast majority concern transfers of or titles to real estate. That the documents contain a wealth of untapped material is exemplified by my earlier research (Witschey 1986) in which I was able to demonstrate, by mapping the location of many of the tracts of land, that most of the property of Ebtun did not fall in a concentric zone around the town, but rather occupied a 90 degree cone which was west of the town, indicating by property ownership that Ebtun was not the home village for most of its inhabitants. Further, this research revealed internal evidence for some units of measure employed in northern Yucatan.