Matthew Restall
Biographic Data
| ID | 3589319 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Restall |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Restall |
| SIGNATURE | RESTALL M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 90 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 320 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 89 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
As the Gods Kill: Morality and Social Violence Among the Precolonial Maya
An Outpost of Colonialism: The Hispanic Community of Mérida, Yucatán, 1690-1730
Legitimised Violence in Colonial Spanish America
This chapter focuses on eight historical developments identified as contexts for legitimised violence in Spanish America. These include the wars of conquest, which Spaniards legitimised through ‘factual’ arguments, such as combating barbarity and bringing civility to indigenous peoples; the Spiritual Conquest of indigenous peoples and the associated activities of the Spanish Inquisition, both of which sometimes featured violence as a means to sup…
Colonizations
“Colonizations” charts the invasions and dislocations experienced on an unprecedented scale by the Maya peoples since the sixteenth century. The Maya area is carved up among five nation-states—Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. Agricultural centers such as Guatemala experienced slavery and exploitation in the nineteenth century, and in the latter half of the twentieth century, Mayas in Guatemala were subject to a campaign of vi…
The Maya: A Very Short Introduction
The Maya: A Very Short Introduction examines the history and evolution of Maya civilization, explaining Maya polities or city-states, artistic expression, and ways of understanding the universe. Study of the Maya has tended to focus on the 2,000 years of history prior to contact with Europeans, and romantic ideas of discovery and disappearance have shaped popular myths about the Maya. However, they neither disappeared at the close of the Classic …
Maya militia: The defense and government of colonial Ixil, Yucatan
To the westward of Telchac, 9 miles, is a lookout tower, and a rancho of a few huts, named Yxil in a grove of cocoanut [sic] trees.W.W. Gillpatrick, U.S.N., 18851 The road from the town of Ixil is
Presidential Address: "The Trouble with "America
This address reflects upon the ethical responsibility of ethnohistorians to consider the ongoing impact of historical depictions of indigenous peoples, in text and image, and our handling of those depictions. The essay draws in particular upon the historical mistreatment and misrepresentation of indigenous women, using Pocahontas and Malinche as examples of distorted icons, referencing the hidden history of the sixteenth-century trade in indigeno…
Return to Ixil: Maya Society in an Eighteenth-century Yucatec Town
An examination of 100+ previously unstudied colonial-era Maya wills from the Yucatec town of Ixil. These testaments--some of the only surviving documentation of colonial inhabitation--offer unprecedented depictions of material and spiritual life from 1738 to 1779 and are rare and rich resources of Maya language.--Provided by publisher
Creating “Belize”: The Mapping and Naming History of a Liminal Locale
The origins of the settlement in southwest Yucatan that subsequently became the British colony and then nation of Belize, along with the etymology of the toponym Belize, are poorly understood and clouded by colonialist mythology. Using cartographic, archival, and other textual sources, including some in Yucatec Mayan, this article offers a revisionist argument regarding initial British settlement in the region and proposes a new solution to the m…
Polygamy and the Rise and Demise of the Aztec Empire ‐ by Hassig, Ross
“There Was a Time When We Were Friends”: Las Casas and Cortés as Monstrous Doubles of the Conquest Era
The People of the Patio: Ethnohistorical Evidence of Yucatec Maya Royal Courts
This chapter discusses the four methods used by the Maya ruling class to perpetuate symbolic of the continuity of status. Symbolic of the continuity of the court despite the disruption of conquest is the fact that one of those seized on Napot Canche's patio was a grandson of his, Nachan Couoh, who would later become baptized and serve as batab of Calkini. The ethnohistorical evidence on Maya slaveholding in and before the sixteenth century is eff…
Latin America in Colonial Times
Few milestones in human history are as momentous as the meeting of three great civilizations on American soil in the sixteenth century. The fully revised textbook Latin America in Colonial Times presents that story in an engaging but informative new package, revealing how a new civilization and region - Latin America - emerged from that encounter. The authors give equal attention to the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and settlers, to the Afric…
When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History
On November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction--the prelude to the Spanish seizure of Mexico City and to European colonization of the mainland of the Americas--has long been the symbol of Cortés's bold and brilliant military genius. Montezuma, on the other hand, is remembered as a coward who gave away a vast empire and tou…
In the Shadow of Cortés: Conversations Along the Route of Conquest - by Myers, Kathleen Ann
The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century World - by Kazanjian, David
Maya Ethnogenesis and Group Identity in Yucatán, 1500–1900
Drought and Its Demographic Effects in the Maya Lowlands
Increasing evidence supports the role of climate change in the disintegration of regional polities in the Maya lowlands at the end of the Classic Period (750-1000 CE). However, the demographic effects of drought remain largely unknown in the absence of Classic Period textual evidence indicating declines in agricultural productivity and population over this broad geographic area. To understand the relationship between climate change and demography…
Imperialism and the Origins of Mexican Culture
Colin MacLachlan's new book is something of a riddle. If not quite genre-bending, it certainly seems genre-defying.The initial impression given by the book is that it is a monograph. Consider the object: a hefty hardback (cloth only, at least upon release) with a serious university press. Consider the author: a senior scholar who has over the past four decades given us an extremely impressive series of books on the histories of Mexico, Brazil, an…
On the Lips of Others: Moteuczoma's Fame in Aztec Monuments and Rituals
This intriguing and intelligent book is a testimony to what a creative and persistent scholar can do with a single word. As Patrick Thomas Hajovsky reveals in the preface to On the Lips of Others, while studying Nahuatl as a graduate student he became fascinated by tenyotl. Literally meaning “lip-ness,” the term is translatable as “fame.” Such a gloss requires an explanation, of course, and this Hajovsky provides over the course of ten chapters.I…
Editor's Preface
James Lockhart (1933-2014)
The Modern Maya: Incidents of Travel and Friendship in Yucatán
Book Review| January 01 2015 The Modern Maya: Incidents of Travel and Friendship in Yucatán The Modern Maya: Incidents of Travel and Friendship in Yucatán. By Everton, Macduff. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. xiii + 352 pp., photographs, foreword, epilogue, glossary, suggested reading. $50.00 cloth.) Matthew Restall Matthew Restall Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2015) 62 (1): 172–173. https://do…
Editor's Preface
Obituary James Lockhart (1933-2014)
James Lockhart ( 1 9 3 3 -2 0 1 4
Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest
Here is an intriguing exploration of the ways in which the history of the Spanish Conquest has been misread and passed down to become popular knowledge of these events. The book offers a fresh account of the activities of the best-known conquistadors and explorers, including Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro. Using a wide array of sources, historian Matthew Restall highlights seven key myths, uncovering the source of the inaccuracies and exploding th…
Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America
“I, Juan Garrido, black resident [ de color negro vecino ] of this city [Mexico], appear before Your Mercy and state that I am in need of making a probanza to the perpetuity of the king [ a perpetuad rey ], a report on how I served Your Majesty in the conquest and pacification of this New Spain, from the time when the Marqués del Valle [ Cortés ] entered it; and in his company I was present at all the invasions and conquests and pacifications whi…
Drought and Its Demographic Effects in the Maya Lowlands
Increasing evidence supports the role of climate change in the disintegration of regional polities in the Maya lowlands at the end of the Classic Period (750-1000 CE). However, the demographic effects of drought remain largely unknown in the absence of Classic Period textual evidence indicating declines in agricultural productivity and population over this broad geographic area. To understand the relationship between climate change and demography…
The New Conquest History
Our understanding and perceptions of the conquest period in Latin American history have been profoundly altered by the scholarship of the past twenty years. The traditional triumphalist narrative of the Spanish Conquest focused heavily on the conquistadors in Mexico and Peru, and emphasized the inevitability and rapidity of military victory, religious conversion (the Spiritual Conquest), and colonization. The revisionist New Conquest History – wh…
Heirs to the Hieroglyphs: Indigenous Writing in Colonial Mesoamerica
Shortly after the Spanish conquests in Mesoamerica (or, as the colonizers termed it, New Spain), friars chiefly of the Franciscan and Dominican orders taught the art of alphabetic writing to the indigenous elite. As a result the colonial period saw the production of an extensive body of documentation—overwhelmingly notarial and largely legal in nature—by Mesoamerica's indigenous peoples, written in their own languages but using the Roman alphabet…
A Reevaluation of the Authenticity of Fray Diego de Landa'sRelación de las cosas de Yucatán
This article analyzes the appearance and content of the surviving archival manuscript of the Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, ascribed to Fray Diego de Landa (1524-79), the most prominent of the first generation of Franciscan friars in the Spanish colony of Yucatán. This analysis is placed in the context of the way in which published editions of the work have been treated and used since the manuscript's rediscovery in the 1860s. The authors argu…
Life and Death in a Maya Community: The Ixil Testaments of the 1760s
An Encounter of Two Worlds: The Book of Chilam Balam of Kaua
The publication of a new edition of one of the books of Chilam Balam is always something of an event. Written alphabetically in Maya, the manuscripts are rich sources of information on Yucatec Maya history and culture, and only nine have survived from the colonial period. This edition is especially noteworthy, because although the Book of Chilam Balam of Kaua is the longest of the nine survivors (roughly 280 manuscript pages), it has never been p…
The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550-1850
This pathbreaking work is a social and cultural history of the Maya peoples of the province of Yucatan in colonial Mexico, spanning the period from shortly after the Spanish conquest of the region to its incorporation as part of an independent Mexico. Instead of depending on the Spanish sources and perspectives that have formed the basis of previous scholarship on colonial Yucatan, the author aims to give a voice to the Maya themselves, basing hi…
Crossing to Safety? Frontier Flight in Eighteenth-Century Belize and Yucatan
In the eighteenth century there was increasingly endemic flight by black slaves out of British logging camps and settlements in Belize across the colonial frontier into Yucatan and other adjacent Spanish territories. This article explores the evidence for this phenomenon, its possible causes and reasons why flight did not occur in the opposite directions, and the implications of flight by nonslaves. Yucatan and Belize were very different societie…
He Wished It in Vain: Subordination and Resistance among Maya Women in Post-Conquest Yucatan
Matthew Restall, "He Wished It in Vain": Subordination and Resistance among Maya Women in Post-Conquest Yucatan, Ethnohistory, Vol. 42, No. 4, Women, Power, and Resistance in Colonial Mesoamerica (Autumn, 1995), pp. 577-594
The African Experience in Early Spanish America
Of the five great African diasporas of historical record, as recently described by Colin Palmer, the fourth includes the story of Blacks in Spanish America. It remains the best studied of the “five major African diasporic streams,” thanks to pioneering work by scholars such as Palmer, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Frederick Bowser, Herbert Klein, Rolando Mellafe, and others, as well as a flurry of recent and forthcoming publications by a new generatio…
Years of Mayan Literature
Book Review| October 01 2011 2000 Years of Mayan Literature 2000 Years of Mayan Literature. By Tedlock, Dennis. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. xi + 465 pp., introduction, maps, figures, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth.) Matthew Restall Matthew Restall Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2011) 58 (4): 751–752. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-1333868 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Fa…
The Ties That Bind: Social Cohesion and the Yucatec Maya Family
This analysis of unstudied census materials and Maya-language notarial records explores the nature of Maya familial organization and identity in colonial Yucatán, Mexico. At the intersection of the two primary units of Maya society, the community and the patronym-group, existed the extended family, which was formed through marriage alliances within largely endogamous communities between strictly exogamous patronym-groups, expressed as a multiunit…
The Discovery and Conquest of Peru: Chronicles of the New World Encounter
Book Review| October 01 2000 The Discovery and Conquest of Peru: Chronicles of the New World Encounter By Pedro de Cieza de León. Edited and translated by Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook. (Durham, : Duke University Press,1998. xviii + 501 pp., prologue, introduction, maps, illustrations, notes,bibliography. $21.95 paper.) Matthew Restall Matthew Restall Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2000) 47 (3…
The Mysterious and the Invisible: Writing History in and of Colonial Yucatan
This brief essay argues that studying the non-Spanish inhabitants of Yucatan's past requires bridging the social distance generated by differences of time and culture and that the specific nature of that distance must first be understood. With respect to the Mayas, their mystique in the modern popular and academic imaginations is as much the creation of Maya elites in ancient and colonial times as it is the product of archaeologists and historian…
Presidential Address: "The Trouble with "America
This address reflects upon the ethical responsibility of ethnohistorians to consider the ongoing impact of historical depictions of indigenous peoples, in text and image, and our handling of those depictions. The essay draws in particular upon the historical mistreatment and misrepresentation of indigenous women, using Pocahontas and Malinche as examples of distorted icons, referencing the hidden history of the sixteenth-century trade in indigeno…
Cave, City, and Eagle's Nest: An Interpretive Journey through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2
Mesolore: Exploring Mesoamerican Culture. CD-ROM created by Liza Bakewell and Byron Hamann. Providence: Brown University, 2001. 2CDs. $39.95
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The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. Vol. 2: Mesoamerica, part 2
Multivolume compilation reference works by their very nature face two challenges. One is the challenge of timeliness, which I shall discuss later. The other is the challenge of coherence, of covering the history of a large region over a substantial period of time using a wide array of scholars and still achieving some degree of consistency of form and interpretation. With respect to the book under review here, the time and place is postconquest M…
Documents Relating to the Mirones Expedition to the Interior of Yucatan, 1621-1624
Vision and Revision in Maya Studies
Vision and Revision in Maya Studies
Of the Manners of Speaking that the Old Ones Had: The Metaphors of Andres de Olmos in the Tulal Manuscript
Of the Manners of Speaking that the Old Ones Had: The Metaphors of Andrés de Olmos in the Tulal Manuscript
Imagining the Maya: Sources and Scholarship
He Wished It in Vain: Subordination and Resistance among Maya Women in Post-Conquest Yucatan
Matthew Restall, "He Wished It in Vain": Subordination and Resistance among Maya Women in Post-Conquest Yucatan, Ethnohistory, Vol. 42, No. 4, Women, Power, and Resistance in Colonial Mesoamerica (Autumn, 1995), pp. 577-594
Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes
Ethnohistory of the Pacific Coast: Prehispanic and Colonial Life in Guatemala and Mexico
Heirs to the Hieroglyphs: Indigenous Writing in Colonial Mesoamerica
Shortly after the Spanish conquests in Mesoamerica (or, as the colonizers termed it, New Spain), friars chiefly of the Franciscan and Dominican orders taught the art of alphabetic writing to the indigenous elite. As a result the colonial period saw the production of an extensive body of documentation—overwhelmingly notarial and largely legal in nature—by Mesoamerica's indigenous peoples, written in their own languages but using the Roman alphabet…
Life and Death in a Maya Community: The Ixil Testaments of the 1760s
Life and Death in a Maya Community: The Ixil Testaments of the 1760s
Central Issues: Social History and the Recent Study of Colonial Central America
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Dead giveaways: Indigenous testaments of colonial Mesoamerica and the Andes
In addition to providing information on families, gender roles, property holdings, institutional structures, social and familial relationships, and religious beliefs and practices, this study demonstrates how wills for a given region provide evidence for understanding cultural change over time
The Ties That Bind: Social Cohesion and the Yucatec Maya Family
This analysis of unstudied census materials and Maya-language notarial records explores the nature of Maya familial organization and identity in colonial Yucatán, Mexico. At the intersection of the two primary units of Maya society, the community and the patronym-group, existed the extended family, which was formed through marriage alliances within largely endogamous communities between strictly exogamous patronym-groups, expressed as a multiunit…
Rebels of Highland Guatemala: The Quiche-Mayas of Momostenango
The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550-1850
This pathbreaking work is a social and cultural history of the Maya peoples of the province of Yucatan in colonial Mexico, spanning the period from shortly after the Spanish conquest of the region to its incorporation as part of an independent Mexico. Instead of depending on the Spanish sources and perspectives that have formed the basis of previous scholarship on colonial Yucatan, the author aims to give a voice to the Maya themselves, basing hi…
Maya History and Agency in Colonial Yucatan
Conquistador. MATTHEW RESTALL. Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1998; xvi + 254 pp. The World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550-1850. MATTHEW RESTALL. Stanford CA: Stanford university Press, 1997; xiv + 441 pp. Over the last two decades students of Mesoamerica have increasingly turned their attention to theorizing indigenous agency and intentionality. This is perhaps most evident in the number of ethnohistorical studies that seek to recover native voice…
The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town/ Mexican Rural Development and the Plumed Serpent: Technology and Maya Cosmology in the Tropical Forest of Campeche, Mexico
The War for the Heart and Soul of. Highland Maya Town. ROBERT S. CARLSEN. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. xvi. 206 pp., notes, glossary, bibliography, index.Mexican Rural Development and the Plumed Serpent: Technology and Maya Cosmology in the Tropical Forest of Campeche, Mexico. BETTY BERNICE FAUST. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1998. xxviii. 190 pp., references, index, photographs
Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America
“I, Juan Garrido, black resident [ de color negro vecino ] of this city [Mexico], appear before Your Mercy and state that I am in need of making a probanza to the perpetuity of the king [ a perpetuad rey ], a report on how I served Your Majesty in the conquest and pacification of this New Spain, from the time when the Marqués del Valle [ Cortés ] entered it; and in his company I was present at all the invasions and conquests and pacifications whi…
The African Experience in Early Spanish America
Of the five great African diasporas of historical record, as recently described by Colin Palmer, the fourth includes the story of Blacks in Spanish America. It remains the best studied of the “five major African diasporic streams,” thanks to pioneering work by scholars such as Palmer, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Frederick Bowser, Herbert Klein, Rolando Mellafe, and others, as well as a flurry of recent and forthcoming publications by a new generatio…
The Discovery and Conquest of Peru: Chronicles of the New World Encounter
Book Review| October 01 2000 The Discovery and Conquest of Peru: Chronicles of the New World Encounter By Pedro de Cieza de León. Edited and translated by Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook. (Durham, : Duke University Press,1998. xviii + 501 pp., prologue, introduction, maps, illustrations, notes,bibliography. $21.95 paper.) Matthew Restall Matthew Restall Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2000) 47 (3…
The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. Vol. 2: Mesoamerica, part 2
Multivolume compilation reference works by their very nature face two challenges. One is the challenge of timeliness, which I shall discuss later. The other is the challenge of coherence, of covering the history of a large region over a substantial period of time using a wide array of scholars and still achieving some degree of consistency of form and interpretation. With respect to the book under review here, the time and place is postconquest M…
A Reevaluation of the Authenticity of Fray Diego de Landa'sRelación de las cosas de Yucatán
This article analyzes the appearance and content of the surviving archival manuscript of the Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, ascribed to Fray Diego de Landa (1524-79), the most prominent of the first generation of Franciscan friars in the Spanish colony of Yucatán. This analysis is placed in the context of the way in which published editions of the work have been treated and used since the manuscript's rediscovery in the 1860s. The authors argu…
Epilogue
Subject Latin American History Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
History (73 works) · Latin American history and culture (55 works) · Archaeology (50 works) · Art (40 works) · Ancient history (35 works) · Political science (31 works) · Maya (28 works) · Law (27 works) · History (25 works) · Geography (24 works)