This homenaje to Sidney D. Markman, emeritus professor of art history at Duke University, consists of ten articles by scholars of colonial Central America. They represent a broad range of disciplines with subjects of interest to serious students of the region.
After a discussion by José Antonio Calderón Quijano of Markman’s professional achievements, there is a short introduction by Duncan Kinkead. Francisco Solano writes of “La conquista urbana de América Central (1509-1579), noting the challenges of creating new European-type settlements in areas already heavily populated. Jorge E. Hardoy follows with a useful and detailed essay on “La historia cartográfica’’ of colonial Central America. Lawrence Feldman then gives a short account of many disasters that occurred in the region. Although he omits some of the most important catastrophes, he does record dates and places of many earthquakes that damaged churches between 1689 and 1821.
In the second category, essays examine the nature of urban settlements. The structural features and physical appearance of a colonial Maya village are described by Thomas A. Lee, Jr. David Jickling’s “Vecinos of Santiago in 1604” utilizes the first census-by-name undertaken in the area as the primary document to study the 762 households in Santiago de Guatemala. In discussing the city’s racial and socioeconomic structure, the author provides a wealth of data useful for research into the social history of early seventeenth-century Central America. In his examination of the implications of reduced family size among Indian groups in seventeenth-century Honduras, Murdo J. MacLeod makes a valuable addition to his earlier demographic studies. He finds that Indians often had too few children to maintain the population at the same level. Ralph Lee Woodward contributes a substantial piece on late colonial economic history, offering a scholarly treatment of this important theme.
The final category of papers consists of three studies on the arts. Jorge Luján Muñoz presents an article on the construction and reconstruction of two eighteenth-century churches, accompanied by photographs. The author concedes that they are not of great importance architecturally, but the documentation concerning them is unusually complete. Carroll Edward Mace contributes an extensive and excellent article on Guatemalan ritual dances, ranging from the sacred to erotic humor. Finally, there is a short treatment, along with photographs, of colonial church organs in Guatemala written by Antonio Bonet Correa. Although several distinct subjects are covered in this collection, all are of some value to students of colonial Latin America, and some are very well done.
