Marriage and the Family Among the Maya of Cozumel Island, 1570

Resumen

In his obituary of the late Maya scholar, Ralph L. Roys, Thompson (1967, p. 97) calls attention to important document, on which Roys worked, which has been neglected by those currently engaged in Maya settlement pattern research. The document in question is the Cozumel Census of 1570, which has been called only detailed account of the way the Maya lived at the time of the Spanish conquest (Roys, Scholes and Adams, 1949, p. 14). If this is the case, obviously the neglect of this source of information is a serious matter. It is the porpoise of this paper to take a new look at the Cozumel Census, to see what conclusions may be drawn from it.