The bonfire was not the end

Claim (verbatim)

Diego de Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán records the sentence passed at the Maní auto-da-fé of July 1562: a large number of books in the Maya characters were found, and because they contained nothing free of superstition and the devil's falsehoods, all were burned. The four surviving codices plus that sentence make the standard story — a literature ended in one afternoon. The extirpation files say otherwise. John F. Chuchiak IV's work through the Yucatecan idolatry proceedings — diocesan trials, visitas, and confiscation records preserved in the Archivo General de Indias, the Mexican national archives, and the archiepiscopal archive of Yucatán — turns up hieroglyphic books being surrendered, seized, and burned decade after decade, with documented incidents reaching the 1690s, more than a century and a quarter after Maní. The mechanism converts those notices into a production claim: bark paper and gesso do not last in tropical use, so a working codex needed recopying within a few generations, and a hieroglyphic book seized in the 1690s is therefore far likelier to be colonial-made than a pre-conquest heirloom. The trials document not a residue but an industry — a clandestine colonial scribal tradition producing hieroglyphic books under prohibition for over a century, of which not one physical exemplar survives. Prediction: a census of documented incidents involving hieroglyphic codices in Yucatecan ecclesiastical and civil proceedings, 1563-1700, will yield at least fifteen distinct incidents distributed across at least 120 years, including at least one after 1690 (primary clause: the fifteen-incidents-across-120-years count; the verdict follows it). Kill: not yet built as a single dataset — to be compiled from the AGI (Audiencia de México) and AGN (Inquisición and criminal ramos) series and the Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de Yucatán, with John F. Chuchiak IV's published censuses of colonial codex references (his Tulane dissertation on the extirpation courts and subsequent articles) as the finding aid.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: a census of documented incidents involving hieroglyphic codices in Yucatecan ecclesiastical and civil proceedings, 1563-1700, will yield at least fifteen distinct incidents distributed across at least 120 years, including at least one after 1690 (primary clause: the fifteen-incidents-across-120-years count; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: not yet built as a single dataset — to be compiled from the AGI (Audiencia de México) and AGN (Inquisición and criminal ramos) series and the Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de Yucatán, with John F. Chuchiak IV's published censuses of colonial codex references (his Tulane dissertation on the extirpation courts and subsequent articles) as the finding aid.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Chuchiak's extirpation-court scholarship has worked precisely this neighborhood: his Tulane dissertation and articles on the Yucatecan provisorato document Maya hieroglyphic books being surrendered, seized, and burned decade after decade well into the late seventeenth century, and the argument for a clandestine colonial scribal tradition persisting after Mani is his. What remains un-run is the specific unified census the primary clause names — at least fifteen distinct proceedings distributed across at least 120 years with at least one after 1690 — which the conjecture itself flags as 'not yet built as a single dataset,' to be compiled from the AGI, AGN and AHAY series with Chuchiak's registers as finding aid. The pattern is in print; the arithmetic tally against the stated thresholds is the study still to be done.

• John F. Chuchiak IV, 'The Indian Inquisition and the Extirpation of Idolatry: The Process of Punishment in the Provisorato de Indios of the Diocese of Yucatan, 1563-1812' (PhD diss., Tulane University, 2000)
• Alfred M. Tozzer (ed. and trans.), Landa's Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan (Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 18, Harvard University, 1941)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.