Old Maya Palimpsests, Regenerative Copies, and a Modern Publication

ABSTRACT Several years ago, Hilario Chi Canul showed Valentina Vapnarsky a collection of ancient Maya notebooks, which had been entrusted to him as an Indigenous Maya scholar. Their content remained opaque to him and their nature ambiguous. We have since collaborated to decipher these texts, exploring their histories and materialities while considering how to ethically share them. Our approach has evolved as we have gained insights into the meanings and functions of these palimpsestic religious texts through ethnographic, philological, and historical work. Discovering that many writings were part of a regular process of copying and recopying for regeneration, we considered print publication. However, this raised a number of questions. Can the printed version be considered as another regenerative copy? What about the transformative power of the oralization of the text that generally takes place between two written copies? Would printed copies be as readily accepted by the ritual specialists as the digital copies used in our research? What kind of interest would they and the lay Maya find in publications of such kind? This article addresses these issues, examining the relations between traditional written texts, modern publications, and cultural regeneration.