Return to Ixil

Return to Ixil is an examination of over 100 colonial-era Maya wills from the Yucatec town of Ixil, presented together and studied fully for the first time. These testaments make up the most significant corpus of Maya-language documents from the colonial period. Offering an unprecedented picture of material and spiritual life in Ixil from 1738 to 1779, they are rare and rich sources for the study of Maya culture and history.   Supplemented with additional archival research, the wills provide new and detailed descriptions of various aspects of life in eighteenth-century Ixil. In each chapter, authors Mark Christensen and Matthew Restall examine a different dimension of Ixil’s colonial history, including the role of notaries, Maya participation in a coastal militia, economy and modes of production, religious life and records, and the structures and patterns of familial relationships. These details offer insight into the complex network of societies in colonial Yucatan, colonial Mesoamerica, and colonial Latin America.   Including an appendix presenting the original Maya texts as well as translations by Christensen and Restall, Return to Ixil not only analyzes the largest body of substantive wills in any Mayan language known today but also provides a rare closeup view of the inner workings of a colonial Maya town and the communal and familial affairs that made up a large part of the Maya colonial experience. It will be of great interest to Mayanists as well as to students and scholars of history, anthropology, ethnohistory, linguistics, and social history.   The publication of this book is supported in part byBrigham Young University and Penn State University.  

Mark Z. Christensen is associate professor of history at Brigham Young University. He has written various articles on colonial Latin America and is the author or coauthor of several books, including The Teabo Manuscript, winner of the LASA Mexico Section Book Award in the Humanities. Matthew Restall is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and director of Latin American Studies at Penn State University. He is a past president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, edits the Hispanic American Historical Review, and has written numerous articles, essays, and books on Latin American history, including When Montezuma Met Cortés.