1 - Histomesoamericana

Acknowledgments
I have many debts. The first is to the U.S. Postal Service for having lost
my Roys Chumayel in the mail. Without that, my collaboration with
Victoria R. Bricker might have been less close and less productive. She
can now have her Roys back together with my gratitude for her tact and
energy as critic, adviser, and colleague. I am also returning Harvey M.
Backer's pocket calculator with equal gratitude for his getting hooked,
however briefly, on the Mayan correlation problem.
For help with the Mayan language I am indebted to Eleuterio Poot Yah
of Hocaba and Merida, Moisés Romero Castillo, Marshall Durbin, Francesca
Merlan, and the late Robert Wauchope, who, as director of the
Middle American Research Institute of Tulane, provided funds from a
Ford Foundation grant to help with the formation of a working dictionary.
Thanks go also to the students who worked on that project—Thomas
Langdon, Robert Moore, Maurice Onwood, and James H. Rauh—and to a
number of other stimulating students, particularly Maria Hires, whose
interest got me started on the Tizimin, as well as Malcolm Shuman,
Philip Thompson, and Marcia Jordan Thompson, whose research in Yucatan
has provided me with a form of vicarious fieldwork.
I am grateful to Tulane University and the National Endowment for the
Humanities for a summer grant that enabled me to complete the translation
and to Arthur Welden for including me in the Tulane Yucatan Colloquium
that got me to parts of the peninsula I had never visited. The
generosity, hospitality, and assistance of Alfredo Barrera Vasquez and
Joann M. Andrews during my visits to Yucatan are profoundly appreciated.
The helpful and creative labor of the late Marjorie LeDoux, director
of the Latin American Library at Tulane, has been invaluable to me over
many years, specifically so on this project.
Finally I should like to thank my wife, Barbara Edmonson, for letting
me make free of her time and intelligence over many years, with the
promise that I'll get back to cutting the hedge (and she can get back to her
own research) before another uinal goes by.
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