Log in
Indigenous Scholars Unlock Princeton’s Remarkable Maya Manuscript Collection and its Crucial Research Potential
Héctor Rolando Xol Choc, one of few scholars capable of reading the native Mayan language Q’eqchi’, has discovered something among Princeton University Library’s (PUL) collection of Mesoamerican manuscripts that has fundamentally challenged our understanding of colonial Maya cultures.
“[I was surprised] to feel the ‘spirit’ of the scribal ancestors of the Maya documents and read the texts in the language they once spoke.”
— Héctor Rolando Xol Choc, Independent Scholar
Among eight native Mayan language scholars who attended the week-long summer Mesoamerican Manuscript Workshop in Princeton’s Special Collections, Xol Choc was asked simply to identify the languages in which a set of documents in the Garrett-Gates Mesoamerican Manuscript collection were written. But Xol Choc’s contribution went much further. He not only deciphered an unusual variant of the language traceable to two specific Guatemalan Maya communities, but he also detected interference from a neighboring Mayan language, indicating the author was not a native speaker.
And then, to the stunned delight of the group, he deciphered key turns of two-word phrases and formal rhetorical poetics distinctively associated with the Maya creation story of the Popol Vuh (written in K’iche’ between 1554-58) and traceable across ancient Maya hieroglyphic writings—decisively not terms or style expected in a Christian text by Spanish missionaries.
It was a metaphorical record needle scratch that has set in motion new lines of research fundamentally probing and recalibrating our understanding of Maya culture in this period.
“The import of Héctor’s discovery is remarkable and complicates the conventional histories about the introduction of Christianity and erasure of Native religions, as it points to Indigenous agency and intelligence on the page not merely in reaction to but in the midst of this moment in time,” said Associate Professor of Religion Garry Sparks. “When you have a native speaker who is also a relentless archival investigator, that‘s when you get these exhilarating moments,” he added.
Since the June workshop Xol Choc’s collaboration has also helped confirm that six of these manuscripts in Q’eqchi’ (GGMM, nos. 236-241) were originally all parts of a larger document that was divided when sold to collectors at the turn of the twentieth century.
Xol Choc and Sparks, along with a growing constellation of fellow researchers, are working to understand and contexualize these pivotal discoveries.
Princeton’s three collections of Mesoamerican manuscripts comprise not only the world’s largest, but also among the earliest original colonial writings in Mayan languages, with 122 in K’iche’, 77 in Maaya’ T’aan (Yucatec), and the remainder in Kaqchikel, Q’eqchi’, Poqomam, Poqomchi’, Tz’utujil, among others as well as other Indigenous languages like Nahuatl, Purepecha, Otomi, and Zapotec.
Maximizing the research potential housed in this incomparable collection continues to be a PUL priority. To this end, Sparks and Frauke Sachse, Director of Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, convened the Mesoamerican Manuscript Workshop in June 2025 with support from the Princeton Humanities Initiative along with a Special Grant from the Humanities Council’s Stewart Fund for Religion.
“This is exactly the kind of work the initiative seeks to support—research that brings to the table the expertise and insight of many different scholars and practitioners and, through such collaborative, community-engaged inquiry, challenges what we thought we knew about the historical record.”
— Director of the Princeton Humanities Initiative Rachael Z. DeLue
“This is exactly the kind of work the initiative seeks to support—research that brings to the table the expertise and insight of many different scholars and practitioners and, through such collaborative, community-engaged inquiry, challenges what we thought we knew about the historical record,” said Director of the Princeton Humanities Initiative and Professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology Rachael DeLue. “Having a clear sense of the authorship and trajectory over time of these manuscripts contributes to a more rigorous and accurate account of a significant aspect of human culture and history. It was a pleasure throughout the workshop to witness the power of humanistic inquiry to recover the truth and set the record straight.”
The team of eight native-speaking scholars comprised Yucatec speakers Irma Yolanda Pomol Cahum, Miguel Óscar Chan Dzul, and Miriam Uitz May from the Universidad de Oriente, Valladolid in Yucatán, Mexico; K’iche’ speaker Saqijix Candelaria Dominga López Ixcoy, and Tz’utujil, Kaqchikel, and K’iche’ speaker Ajpub’ Pablo García Ixmatá from the Universidad Rafael Landívar in Guatemala City, Guatemala; and independent researchers Olga Yolanda Méndez Chavajay de García, who speaks Tz’utujil, María Beatriz Par Sapon, who speaks K’iche’ and Kaqchikel, and Héctor Rolando Xol Choc, who speaks Q’eqchi’, K’iche’, and Kaqchikel.
Sparks and Sachse focused on three goals in framing the workshop: developing relationships with Native speaking scholars who share the cultural heritage of the items; expanding access to and exposure of the materials; and progressing research projects rooted in the manuscripts.
As the week buzzed with discoveries and connections like Xol Choc’s, the success of the workshop felt palpable—resulting in a far more accurately identified and accessible set of data and unleashing countless new lines of research.
“I consider it as such an important key to continue working on the recovery of the thoughts of my ancestors,” García Ixmatá elaborated, “and to be able to differentiate the Christian ideologies that have caused much damage in the life of the Maya people. The documents themselves are part of the linguistic resistance which today is an opportunity and a duty to begin to take up and teach Mayan-speaking children and youth.”
Gabriel Swift, PUL Librarian for Early American Collections, found the week invigorating. “This is one of the most exciting and impactful intellectual engagements with the collections that I’ve had since arriving at Princeton in 2010 because of the direct engagement we’re having with the Indigenous community,” he said.
“I consider it as such an important key to continue working on the recovery of the thoughts of my ancestors…and to be able to differentiate the Christian ideologies that have caused much damage in the life of the Maya people. The documents themselves are part of the linguistic resistance which today is an opportunity and a duty to begin to take up and teach Mayan-speaking children and youth.”
— Ajpub’ Pablo García Ixmatá, Universidad Rafael Landívar, Guatemala City
Engaging as curators, stewards, hosts, and colleagues
“It was a gift in my professional and spiritual life to be able to see, touch, and read the manuscripts written in these Mayan languages,” said García Ixmatá. “Even more to be able to find the text in my Tz’utujil Mayan language….An opportunity that I take as a key to continue exploring the feelings, knowledge, and organization of my ancestors.”
While these documents are crucial to human history broadly, they take on especially poignant meaning to Indigenous people.
López Ixcoy valued the opportunity “to have colonial-era manuscripts in view, to touch them, and to read them,” she said. “This contact with the manuscripts awakened deep feelings.”
“To be in the Princeton University Library and to have colonial-era manuscripts in view, to touch them, and to read them…this contact with the manuscripts awakened deep feelings.”
— Saqijix Candelaria Dominga López Ixcoy, Universidad Rafael Landívar, Guatemala City, Guatemala
Xol Choc’s connection to the work took him by surprise. He could “feel the ‘spirit’ of the scribal ancestors of the Maya documents,” he said, describing what it felt like to see authentic signatures on original documents for the first time instead of the copies with which he was used to working. “Some of this handwriting belongs to the last generation of Indigenous peoples who would have known their world prior to the arrival of the Europeans,” Sparks explained. “First contact in this region is really late 1530s, so you’re having Native peoples write in their own languages and writing documents to other Native readers—many of these documents were written without the aid of Europeans or even with Europeans in mind,” Sparks explained. “It just exudes a lot of power and can be highly emotional.”
Héctor Rolando Xol Choc and Garry Sparks examine GGMM, no. 186 (Photo/ Kirstin Ohrt)
The notable responsibility that accompanies the collection necessitates a partnership with the people who share its heritage. The Mesoamerican collection was a gift in 1946 from Robert S. Garrett, Class of 1897, who had purchased them in 1930 from early Mayanist William E. Gates. PUL continues to review questions of provenance and repatriation on an ongoing basis. It sees events like the Mesoamerican Manuscripts Workshop as opportunities to empower scholars and students to closely engage with these materials and to bring researchers, scholars, stewards, and curators into perennial conversation.
The care that PUL dedicates to stewarding the manuscripts and making them accessible was noted by every respondent among the workshop participants.
Xol Choc was impressed by “the care they give to the documents as invaluable sources of information.” Likewise, López Ixcoy was surprised by “the safeguarding” of the manuscripts. “It is surprising how they have reached the libraries, a whole history behind them, and how well they are cared for, but there is also a whole linguistic wealth that must be made known to the new generations,” she said. “There is still much to discover and learn.”
“This very academic work is uncovering lost information about the people and culture who form part of our greater human family,” said Dan Linke, University Archivist and Deputy Head of Special Collections. “I cannot think of anything more important to do.”
Unlocking research that prompts collaboration and reverberates across disciplines
Sparks and Sachse assembled the team of eight native-speaking scholars with the help of Associate Professor Allison Bigelow (University of Notre Dame), who had worked with them on a National Science Foundation (NSF) project interpreting a crucial work of Maya literature, the Popol Vuh. After having collaborated through Zoom, WhatsApp, and email for the past five years, the workshop represented the first opportunity for the group to meet in person. Bringing the group into contact with the original materials stimulated immediate progress. “One of the beautiful things about this kind of workshop is you can tell on the ground how the research projects were shifting as they were gauging the material, saying, ‘I didn’t even know this existed,’ or ‘I never thought about putting this document in conversation with this document,’” said Sparks.
Bigelow was equally thrilled to see the collaborative potential housed in the manuscripts brought to light. “We suspected that Maya researchers would find significant overlaps in their goals and challenges in language revival projects in Yucatec, K’iche’, Tz’utujil, and Q’eqchi’-speaking communities,” she said, “but this visit showed profound and meaningful connections between and among Indigenous Nations in the U.S., Australia, and diverse Latin American contexts, too. Each Nation is different but the degree of overlap is significant, and this visit reinforced our commitment to collaborative community-engaged research.”
The group’s impact on research has already proven exponential. Among their discoveries was the identification by López Ixcoy of a new fragment of the first original Christian theology written in the Americas called the Theologia Indorum (“Theology for/of the Indians”), which increases Princeton’s total to 10 (of the 22 known world-wide). “It inspired me to continue with more strength the work of reading, analyzing, transcribing, and translating manuscripts, specifically Theologia Indorum and the Popol Wuj,” said López Ixcoy.
The Theologia Indorum is also a focus of Sparks’s own research; with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), he is facilitating the reconstruction and translation into English and Spanish of the complete Theologia Indorum from Mayan-language sources. ”This Christian theology was composed by 1554 originally in Mayan languages rather than Latin or Spanish and never published but rather only hand copied,” according to Sparks. “This partial K’iche’ copy (GGMM, no. 181) discovered in June though was written in 1803, which would be the most recently made and provides evidence of its local popularity throughout the colonial era.”
“By the nature of the material, I think it has to be interdisciplinary, and it has to be collaborative.”
— Garry Sparks, Associate Professor of Religion
Through their interdisciplinary lens, the group made other fruitful connections. For example, among the wills housed in the collection (GGMM, no. 142), one belongs to the Maya scribe, Tomás Ossorio, who wrote another version of the Theologia Indorum that is also held at Princeton (GGMM, no. 177)—a connection that a scholar entrenched solely in theological research would not have happened upon.
“By the nature of the material, I think it has to be interdisciplinary, and it has to be collaborative… and you have to be putting the pieces together,” said Sparks. “Here you have a Catholic theology that’s been aided and abetted by a group of Maya, one of whom makes a copy, presumably for a priest, but he’s making it in his native language. And now we have biographical information about him. It augments who these protagonists in this historical narrative are. But if you only look at the doctrinal manuscripts and not the collection of wills, you’re gonna miss it.” Likewise, Sparks continued, “If I’m a historian and I’m just concerned about the distribution of property, and I’m only looking at these Native wills, I’m not going to realize why this will by this guy is such a big deal.”
“An interdisciplinary approach is extremely productive,” Swift agreed. “The pace of discovery is quickened when a team of scholars with a diverse and deep skillset work together who can discuss and answer almost immediately questions that arise to keep momentum moving forward into deeper discoveries.”
Digitizing the collection for universal access
As Associate University Librarian for Special Collections, the late Will Noel understood the importance of shedding light on this collection and its research potential rather than letting it languish at the end of a tunnel only a tenacious researcher would discover. Noel instigated the move to make manuscripts accessible to all online; from deliberate experts to virtual passersby, all of whom could make crucial connections that would shape knowledge more rapidly, more effectively, and more equitably. Under Swift’s direction, Princeton has now digitized the Mesoamerican manuscript collection in its entirety and is working to present the files on a bilingual English/Spanish platform, Mesoamerican Manuscripts at Princeton.
“Shortly after the material was digitized, scholars around the world were making discoveries,” said Swift. Digitization has allowed for the reunification of “orphaned” materials spread across institutions; has provided higher quality copies facilitating corrections to faulty transcriptions; and provides access to peoples and cultures represented in the materials free of geographic or economic obstacles.
“It‘s a new state of technology that I think most people aren’t aware of but I think our colleagues in places like Mexico and Guatemala are in the most need of knowing about and particularly now of course,“ said Sparks. “Now you can not only be investigating all these repositories virtually, you can download them and you can be reconstructing these manuscripts probably in a way that hasn’t existed for hundreds of years.”
“Now you can not only be investigating all these repositories virtually, you can download them and you can be reconstructing these manuscripts probably in a way that hasn’t existed for hundreds of years.”
— Garry Sparks, Associate Professor of Religion
Digitization has been a boon for scholarship but cannot replace looking at materials in person—and vice versa. “There are certain things you can do with the digital files like cutting the document up and recreating it that you obviously would never be able to do with the originals, but there’s also something about looking at chain lines and paper quality and watermarks that you can’t do virtually,” said Sparks. He cited the example of a manuscript the group had examined during the workshop. As they leafed through a 16th-century manuscript, “someone noticed the paper was completely different than other works.” Swifts and Sparks dated it to the nineteenth century. “That doesn’t mean it’s a fake or a forgery,” Sparks explained, “but it means something funky happened that, online, you wouldn’t catch.”
Looking forward
Fueled by the cycle of research answers and questions that the workshop set in motion, Swift and Sparks are funneling that momentum into a new digital platform called the Princeton Initiative for Mesoamerican Manuscripts Studies (PIMMS), a dashboard from which to navigate Princeton’s incomparable Mesoamerican manuscript collection. In a similar vein to Professor Christina Lee’s digital reconstruction of the dispersed 18th-century Library of the Convent of San Agustin in Manila, known as the Archive 1762 project, this allows for sharing reconstituted works. “We’re going to take what Princeton has and add to it what the American Philosophical Society has, and what Penn has, and what the Tozzer has, and what the Newbery has,” said Sparks. “PIMMS could do that virtually.” The site also shares comparisons made between works held by other institutions, annotations by Native speakers, and access to Mayan language training for scholars.
Currently under development, PIMMS plans to house a tool to help transcribe handwritten manuscripts in Mayan languages. Thanks to the summer workshop, López Ixcoy’s transcriptions of 16th-to-18th–century K’iche’ manuscripts and Xol Choc’s of Q’eqchi’ manuscripts are now being used to train the AI-powered platform Transkribus, with a 97% success rate. Pomol Cahum has also begun this work with the Yucatec manuscript the Chilam Balam of Kaua (GGMM, no. 6). Thanks to these efforts, scholars will be equipped to transcribe and then correctly identify other colonial-era manuscripts in Mayan languages regardless of where they are found.
“AI-assisted transcription and eventually translation will become another tool like grammar- and spell-check, which can help with but probably never replace personal familiarity with a language (such as ‘let’s eat, grandma’ vs. ‘let’s eat grandma’),” Sparks noted. “The problem is, once again, these tools are developed based on and for non-Indigenous American languages and literature. Beginning with Princeton’s Mesoamerican manuscripts collection, together with similar collections elsewhere, PIMMS is hoping to shift that.”
In this way Sparks envisions PIMMS to have a generative effect on scholarship, signaling potential research projects that could take the forms of junior papers, senior theses, Ph.D. dissertations or scholarship beyond Princeton, especially by Maya researchers and students in Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize. “No one’s looked at the sermons, and there are so many of them,” Sparks cited as an example, “They should be approaching that collaboratively with people from other disciplines from linguistics to ethnohistory to religious studies and in collaboration with Native speakers.”
From a collection of important but enigmatic texts, eight native Mayan language speaking scholars have cultivated fertile ground, not just to advance their own research, but to seed critical inquiries that grow across disciplines, including anthropology, art history, history, linguistics, literature, music, religion, and sociology.
“Even though the manuscripts have always been available, this is recovering lost knowledge of Indigenous cultures,” said Swift. “This is exactly the kind of scholarly output that Will Noel envisioned in providing experts a week-long research dive with the material – in which the discoveries will inform all of the research going forward.”
“Even though the manuscripts have always been available, this is recovering lost knowledge of Indigenous cultures. This is exactly the kind of scholarly output that Will Noel envisioned in providing experts a week-long research dive with the material – in which the discoveries will inform all of the research going forward.”
— Gabriel Swift, Librarian for Early American Collections
From left: Ajpub’ Pablo García Ixmatá, Irma Yolanda Pomol Cahum, Saqijix Candelaria Dominga López Ixcoy, Héctor Rolando Xol Choc, and María Beatriz Par Sapon (Photo/ Kirstin Ohrt)