Long after the Aztecs and the Incas had become a fading memory, a Maya civilization still thrived in the interior of Central America. "Lost Shores, Forgotten Peoples" is the first collection and translation of important seventeenth-century narratives about Europeans travelling across the great "Ocean Sea" and encountering a people who had maintained an independent existence in the lowlands of Guatemala and Belize.
In these narratives--primary documents written by missionaries and conquistadors--vivid details of these little known Mayan cultures are revealed, answering how and why...