The Maya: A Very Short Introduction

The Maya forged one of the greatest societies in the history of the ancient Americas — and in all of human history. Long before contact with Europeans, Maya communities built spectacular cities with large, well-fed large populations. They mastered the visual arts, and developed a sophisticated writing system that recorded extraordinary knowledge in calendrics, mathematics, and astronomy. The Maya achieved all this without area-wide centralized control. There was never a single, unified Maya state or empire, but always numerous, evolving ethnic groups speaking dozens of distinct Mayan languages. The people we call "Maya" never thought of themselves as such; yet something definable, unique, and endlessly fascinating - what we call Maya culture - has clearly existed for millennia. So what was their self-identity and how did Maya civilization come to be "invented?"

With the Maya historically subdivided and misunderstood in so many ways, the pursuit of what made them "the Maya" is all the more important. In this Very Short Introduction, Restall and Solari explore the themes of Maya identity, city-state political culture, art and architecture, the Maya concept of the cosmos, and the Maya experience of contact with — including invasion by — outsiders. Despite its brevity, this book is unique for its treatment of all periods of Maya civilization, from its origins to the present.

Matthew Restall was educated at Oxford and UCLA. He is now Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Anthropology, and Director of Latin American Studies, at Penn State University. A recent president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, he edits the Hispanic American Historical Review and book series with Cambridge University and Penn State presses. His one hundred publications on three fields of Latin American history-Yucatan and the Maya; Africans in Spanish America; and the Spanish Conquest-include The Maya World; Maya Conquistador; Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest; The Black Middle; 2012 and the End of the World; The Conquistadors; and When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting Than Changed History. His forthcoming books include histories of the Maya town of Ixil and of early Belize.

Amara Solari was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and at Santa Barbara. She is now Associate Professor of Art History and Anthropology at Penn State University. She is the author of three books, 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse (co-authored with Matthew Restall in 2011), Maya Ideologies of the Sacred: The Transfiguration of Space in Colonial Yucatan (2013), and the forthcoming Idolizing Mary: Maya-Christian Icons in Early Modern Yucatán (2019). She has published in The Art Bulletin, Ethnohistory, and the Hispanic American Historical Review of which she is currently a senior editor. Her latest book project is a material, iconographic, and spatial study of the extant corpus of Maya Christian murals in Yucatan.