Return to Ixil: Maya Society in an Eighteenth-Century Yucatec Town

Testaments are a rich source for understanding the past. They can provide information on a wide range of topics such as religious beliefs and practices; political status; economic, household, and family relationships, including the distribution of property; marriage patterns; social roles; and feelings toward others. This also applies to the more than 100 wills from the small Mayan community of Ixil, in the northwest of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, which—supplemented by further archival material—form the essential source base for the interesting study Return to Ixil. Based on their own translation and detailed analysis of these documents written in Yucatec Maya, Mark Christensen and Matthew Restall reconstruct important aspects of the social history of the Yucatec Maya in the eighteenth century. Maya testaments are extremely rare in Yucatan. The period in which the Ixil testaments were written by Mayan scribes and notaries spans more than four decades (from 1738...