Understanding the contact period in the New World depends on drawing together material remains and ethnohistorical sources relevant to indigenous and intrusive cultures. These two books use such resources to study, respectively, a contact- period habitation site in Florida and the life of children in Mesoamerica and the Andes.
The minutiae of culture can put us in sudden touch with the living past. A tiny golden Virgin Mary amulet, fallen from a rosary in the mission settlement of San Martín (Fig Springs) in the middle of Florida more than 350 years ago, focuses our attention on the vast process of imposing European culture on the indigenous population, and on how this project was attacked in countless places along the frontier of New Spain by an army of missionaries busily transplanting ideas and objects to a new environment.
Our perspective on this period has been based largely on the written records of these proselytizers because so little archaeology has been completed. Research in the vicinity of Fig Springs Mission began in 1949 and has continued through the excavations Brent Weisman directed in the late 1980s. Weisman’s book is an excellent site report, with concise yet comprehensive descriptions of research history, recovery and analysis of artifacts and architecture, and interpretation of the mission and its larger cultural context, accompanied by ample, clear illustrations. Praising the book as an exemplar of archaeological reporting should by no means imply that it is dry or unreadable. This is a fine hybrid, combining history with a substantial field report.
Max Shein’s book summarizes information on childbearing and rearing among the Aztecs, the Maya, and the Inca, in order of emphasis. Shein is by profession a pediatrician and by avocation a devoted amateur ethnohistorian. His major source here is Sahagún’s General History of the Things of New Spain, with additional information from the Codex Mendoza, Landa’s Relation of the Things of Yucatán, and Guarnan Poma’s New Chronicle. Anyone researching this topic will find Shein’s summaries and bibliography a useful starting point.
Most of the graphics in Shein’s book are modern abstractions of illustrations in the original sources. The aesthetic success of these modern interpretations no doubt depends on the artist’s use of color, a feature not expressed in the black-and-white reproductions. The line drawings themselves do not improve on the originals and actually detract from the book’s credibility as a scholarly resource. Although Labyrinthos has provided scholars with a commendably wide range of books, more careful editing here would have made Shein’s book a much more solid reference. Small lapses of usage and citation erode the reader’s confidence. But this seems like carping when I consider my own level of skill at pediatrics.
