Mayan Calendar

When I was attending the University of Utah and majoring in Spanish, I got into a discussion with one of the Spanish professors who categorically maintained that the Pre-Columbian Indigenous population of the Americas never developed a system of writing. To this day, most of the historical and anthropological accounts of the ancient civilizations in North, Central, and South America refuse to acknowledge the existence of written documents. I had been reading the old account of the "Spanish Conquest" in the original documents and knew that the Catholic Priests had systematically burned all of the books they found as "heresy." Although this is well known, there are still statements that no writing existed in the Americas. 

Here is a quote from one Wikipedia article espousing the "accepted" position of most American anthropologists and historians in the United States.

The Popol Vuh is a creation narrative written by the K'iche' people before the Spanish conquest of Guatemala, originally preserved through oral tradition until approximately 1550 when it was written down. See Wikipedia: Popol Vuh.

Here is another article, Wikipedia: Maya codices, that presents an entirely different picture of the early writings.

There were many books in existence at the time of the Spanish conquest of Yucatán in the 16th century; most were destroyed by the Catholic priests. Many in Yucatán were ordered destroyed by Bishop Diego de Landa in July 1562. In his conviction of the superiority and absolute truth of Christianity, De Landa wrote: 

We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.

Here is another account from the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas:

Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas lamented that when found, such books were destroyed: "These books were seen by our clergy, and even I saw part of those that were burned by the monks, apparently because they thought [they] might harm the Indians in matters concerning religion, since at that time they were at the beginning of their conversion." The last codices destroyed were those of Nojpetén, Guatemala in 1697, the last city conquered in the Americas. With their destruction, access to the history of the Maya and opportunity for insight into some key areas of Maya life was greatly diminished.

My major for graduate work was in Linguistics, at that time part of the Anthropology Department. My views and the views of the professors at that time differed considerably and I made the fortuitous decision not to pursue a career as a linguist. It is only recently when doing some reading about the current status of linguistics, that I realized how fortunate that decision was.