Nonetheless, his work in documenting and researching the Maya was indispensable in achieving the current understanding of their culture, to the degree that Mayanist William Gates asserted that "ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us in the pages that follow, or have learned in the use and study of what he told".

Landa was in charge of bringing the Roman Catholic faith to the Maya peoples after the Spanish conquest of Yucatán.

After hearing of Roman Catholic Maya who continued to practice idol worship, Landa ordered an Inquisition in Mani, ending with a ceremony called auto de fé.

[8] Scholars have argued that Mexican inquisitions showed little concern to eradicate magic or convict individuals for heterodox beliefs,[9] and that witchcraft was treated more as a religious problem capable of being resolved by confession and absolution.

[10] Landa believed a huge underground network of apostasies,[11] led by displaced indigenous priests, were jealous of the power the Church enjoyed and sought to reclaim it for themselves.

The apostates, Landa surmised, had launched a counteroffensive against the Church, and he believed it was his duty to expose the evil before it could revert the population to their old heathen ways.

Landa claimed that he had discovered evidence of human sacrifice and other idolatrous practices while rooting out native idolatry.

Enraged, Landa stormed through the crowd, released the boy, smashed the idols and began preaching with such zeal and sincerity that they begged him to remain in the land and teach them more.

Landa, like most other Franciscans, subscribed to millenarian ideas,[17] which demanded the mass conversion of as many souls as possible before the turn of the century.

Allen Wells calls his work an "ethnographic masterpiece",[19] and William J. Folan, Laraine A. Fletcher and Ellen R. Kintz have written that the account of Maya social organization and towns before conquest is a "gem".

The results were faithfully reproduced by Landa in his later account, but he recognised that the set contained apparent inconsistencies and duplicates that he was unable to explain.

Later researchers reviewing this material also formed the view that the "de Landa alphabet" was inaccurate or fanciful, and many subsequent attempts to use the transcription remained unconvincing.