The Two Taríacuris and the Early Colonial and Prehispanic Past of Michoacán

This study is deeply researched, methodologically complex, and carefully considered. It is equal parts synthesis of archaeological and historiographical scholarship and granular analysis of a chronicle central to the colonial history of Michoacán, in western Mexico. An archaeologist by training, David Haskell offers a historicist analysis of the Relación de Michoacán, produced between 1539 and 1541 after New Spain's Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza ordered an accounting of Michoacán's history, religion, culture, and immediate colonial status. It discusses Michoacán's precontact history and immediately past colonial experiences. The source has been a staple of scholarship on colonial Michoacán and, as Haskell explains, was a product of collaboration between a Franciscan, Friar Jerónimo de Alcalá, and a coterie of literate, educated Purépecha men, many of them undoubtedly elites. Some scholars have viewed the Relación as a nearly literal accounting of Tarascan political history and royal lineage. Others have conversely concluded that the...