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

by Mark Christensen, Matthew Restall

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. 

448 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 18, 2019

About the author

Mark Christensen, a native of Oregon, is a journalist and author of several books, both fiction and non-fiction. His published works include THE SWEEPS: Behind the Scenes of Network TV, BUILD THE PERFECT BEAST, and most recently THE SO-CAL SPEED SHOP, winner of the Dean Bachelor Award for Best Automobile Book of 2006. A former editor of Oregon Magazine, his freelance writing has appeared in numerous publications, among them Wired, Playboy, TV Guide, Rolling Stone and the LA Times Sunday Magazine. In 1994, The Oregonian named his novel, ALOHA, as the best written by a northwest writer that year. A father of two children, Mark lives with his wife in Laguna Beach, California.