Archive Note
At Mani, Landa staged an auto-da-fe that burned Maya books and images, by his own count some twenty-seven codices along with thousands of sacred objects, contributing to a loss so severe that only three to four pre-Columbian Maya codices survive in the world today. The paradox is that the same man who burned the libraries later wrote the account, his Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan, that preserves much of what is known about Maya life, including Maya tattooing. The campaign's "diabolical" reading of the practices was the colonizer's framing, and it is best quoted as evidence of that mindset rather than repeated as fact.