ABSTRACT
In the sixteenth-century colonial Yucatec accounts of the Motul (Martinez Hernández 1929) and San Francisco (1870) dictionaries, a Popol Na is referred to as the "council house" or "community house." These readings are reiterated in the early seventeenth-century Cholti Maya dictionary by Pedro Moran, in which the term for Mat House—the Popol Otot—is translated as the "community house." To understand the extent and meaning of the artwork on the facade, a review/overview of other models of Maya community structure is necessary before presenting the author model of the Copan community based on Structure 10L-22A. Several scholars have attempted to create models of Lowland Maya community structure with varying degrees of success. Bishop Diego de Landa, writing in the fifteenth century, was probably the first scholar to write about Maya social organization and community structure. Kurjack's reconstruction of Dzibilchaltun community structure is directly in correspondence with Bishop Landa's sixteenth-century observations.
