200 
Berichte und Kommentare 
Anthropos 92.1997 
Conclusions 
Of the ten narratives Forth considers only one 
has its provenance in Timor. It features a bird 
known locally, i. e., by Tetum-speakers, as the 
berliku (Vroklage 1953/11: 141). The call given 
by this bird, i. e., kiu kau, kiu kau, reproduced 
by Vroklage seems to me to differ significantly 
enough from that of the friarbird to suggest that the 
berliku is a different species, and as Forth remarks, 
whereas the berliku is reported to be a small bird, 
the friarbird, being about the size of a pigeon, is 
not especially small. For the record, my Timorese 
informants told me that the berliku is a very small 
bird with a forked tail - decidedly different from 
the friarbird (Pinto personal communication 1996). 
In Raphael das Dores’s dictionary (1907: 93) it is 
identified as a nightingale, and Morris (1984: 13) 
identifies it as a willy wagtail. On the other hand, 
despite it not having a tail that is particularly 
forked, Gregory Forth (personal communication 
1996) suggests this bird is very probably a kind of 
whistler (Pachycephala sp.), which would make 
it correspond to the Manggarai kiong or forest 
whistler (P. nudigula), though possibly not the 
nudigula species. In the Vroklage narrative the 
berliku s antagonist is the crow, a species known 
in Tetum as ka’o, and during the course of my 
fieldwork in Timor I collected a text in which 
crow and friarbird contest the lengths of day and 
night. In due course I hope to publish it; but I 
anticipate the narrative’s existence here in order 
to draw attention to the singularity of the berliku’s 
presence in these avian narratives of confrontation 
that Forth has collated meticulously and explained 
cogently. 
References Cited 
Dores, Raphael das 
1907 Diccionario Teto-Portugués. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacio 
nal. 
Forth, Gregory 
1992 The Pigeon and the Friarbird: The Mythical Origin of 
Death and Daylight in Eastern Indonesia. Anthropos 
87: 423-441. 
Morris, Cliff 
1984 Tetun-English Dictionary. Canberra: The Australian Na 
tional University. (Pacific Linguistics, C, 83) 
Pascoal, Ezequiel Enes 
1967 A Alma de Timor: Vista na sua Fantasia. Braga, Por 
tugal: Barbosa and Xavier, LDA. 
Vroklage, B. A. G. 
1953 Ethnographic der Belu in Zentral-Timor; 3 vols. Leiden: 
E. J. Brill. 
Yinko Paletin’s Discovery 
of the New World 
Aleksandar Boskovic 
Introduction 
Ignacio Bernal’s (1962) impressive annotated bib 
liography of the research in Mesoamerica between 
1514 and 1960, completely omits works published 
in the territory of the former Yugoslavia - in 
particular, articles and books in Croatian, Serbian, 
and Slovenian. This should be attributed mostly 
to the relative inaccessibility of these languages to 
the scholars engaged in Middle American research, 
especially regarding the pre-Columbian cultures. 
People who have working knowledge of these 
languages are mostly engaged in the linguistics, 
history, or Old World (especially Neolithic and 
late Roman) archaeology. They appear to have 
been much less interested in anthropology and 
ethnology, the disciplines that produced most of 
the research in this area in this century. 
Naturally, a short paper could not remedy this 
great disproportion. What I intend to do is to 
present a rather brief overview of the works deal 
ing with the pre-Columbian in Middle America in 
Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian, and then con 
centrate on one of the participants of the conquest 
of Yucatán, Vinko Paletin. 
An Overview of Research 
The first series of articles dealing with the Middle 
American Indians in Croatian appeared in four 
consecutive issues of the Catholic Journal 1 (Ka- 
tolicki list) in Zagreb in 1885 under the same 
title, “Bartolomé de Las Casas and the Indians’ 
Struggle for Freedom” (Jambrusic 1885). These 
articles introduced the great discussions of the Las 
Casas and Ginés de Sepúlveda in the mid-1500s 
to the general public in Croatia. It is interesting 
to note that this appears while Croatia is still part 
of the Austro-Hungarian kingdom, and while the 
Croatian nationalism is on the rise. In that context, 
introducing the discussions that were dealing with 
the human rights of the conquered populations of 
other continents and ethnic backgrounds does seem 
1 I will translate the names of the journals and other publica 
tions, as well as the titles of the contributions, throughout 
the paper, giving the original title right after the translated 
one in the parentheses.