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Pre-Mamom Pottery Variation and the Preclassic Origins of the Lowland Maya summarizes archaeological researchers’ current views on the adoption and first use of pottery across the Maya lowlands. Covering the early Middle Preclassic period, when communities began using and producing pottery for the first time (roughly 1000–600 BC), through to the establishment of a recognizably Maya tradition, termed the Mamom ceramic sphere (about 600–300 BC), the book demonstrates that the adoption was broadly contemporary, with variation in how the new technology was adapted locally.
 
Analyzing ceramics found at sites in Belize, Petén (Guatemala), and Mexico, the contributors provide evidence that the pre-Mamom expansion of pottery resulted from increased dependence on maize agriculture, exploitation of limestone caprock, and greater reliance on a preexisting system of long-distance exchange. The chapters describe the individual experiences of new potting communities at various sites across the region. They are supplemented by appendixes presenting key chronological data as well as the principal types and varieties of pre-Mamom ceramic complexes across the various spheres: Xe, Eb, Swasey, Cunil, and Ek.
 
A significant amount of new material has been excavated in the last decade, changing what is known about the early Middle Preclassic period and making Pre-Mamom Pottery Variation and the Preclassic Origins of the Lowland Maya a first read of the early ceramic prehistory of the Maya lowlands. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in the archaeology of the Maya lowlands, Mesoamerican social complexity, and ceramic technology.
 
Contributors: E. Wyllys Andrews V, Jaime Awe, George J. Bey III, Ronald L. Bishop, Michael G. Callaghan, Ryan H. Collins, Kaitlin Crow, Sara Dzul Góngora, Jerald Ek, Tomás Gallareta Negrón, Bernard Hermes, Takeshi Inomata, Betsy M. Kohut, Laura J. Kosakowsky, Wieslaw Koszkul, Jon Lohse, Michael Love, Nina Neivens, Terry Powis, Duncan C. Pring, Kathryn Reese-Taylor, Prudence M. Rice, Robert M. Rosenswig, Kerry L. Sagebiel, Donald A. Slater, Katherine E. South, Lauren A. Sullivan, Travis Stanton, Juan Luis Velásquez Muñoz, Debra S. Walker, Michal Wasilewski, Jaroslaw Źrałka
 

This monograph presents data from a systematic regional archaeological survey carried out over an area of ca. 600 square kilometers during May through December 1973 by the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology.

Extensive description and analysis of the archaeological settlement data collected in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the Chalco-Xochimilco Region in the Valley of Mexico.

In this volume, archaeologist Jeffrey R. Parsons presents research based on an extensive 1967 survey of the Texcoco Region in the Valley of Mexico. The sites are organized by time period, from Middle Formative to Aztec. Parsons describes the sites in detail and compares them to those of the same time periods in the Teotihuacan Valley and the Valley of Mexico in general.

In this volume, editor Robert D. Drennan presents a series of reports on archaeological research in the Tehuacán Valley of Mexico. Charles S. Spencer writes about irrigation in the Formative period; Elsa M. Redmond reports on a Terminal Formative ceramic workshop; John R. Alden writes about a survey at Quachilco; Drennan provides a preliminary report on excavations at Cuayucatepec; Spencer and Redmond report on Formative and Classic developments in the Cuicatlan Cañada; and Judith E. Smith provides an analysis of carbonized botanical remains from Quachilco, Cuayucatepec, and La Coyotera.

Through the lives and works of three women in colonial California, Bárbara O. Reyes examines frontier mission social spaces and their relationship to the creation of gendered colonial relations in the Californias. She explores the function of missions and missionaries in establishing hierarchies of power and in defining gendered spaces and roles, and looks at the ways that women challenged, and attempted to modify, the construction of those hierarchies, roles, and spaces.

Reyes studies the criminal inquiry and depositions of Barbara Gandiaga, an Indian woman charged with conspiracy to murder two priests at her mission; the divorce petition of Eulalia Callis, the first lady of colonial California who petitioned for divorce from her adulterous governor-husband; and the testimonio of Eulalia Pérez, the head housekeeper at Mission San Gabriel who acquired a position of significant authority and responsibility but whose work has not been properly recognized. These three women's voices seem to reach across time and place, calling for additional, more complex analysis and questions: Could women have agency in the colonial Californias? Did the social structures or colonial processes in place in the frontier setting of New Spain confine or limit them in particular gendered ways? And, were gender dynamics in colonial California explicitly rigid as a result of the imperatives of the goals of colonization?

Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico, originally written in 1934, is addressed to the author’s compatriots, but it speaks to people, wherever they are, who are interested in enriching their own lives and in elevating the cultural level of their countries. And it speaks with a peculiar timeliness to citizens of the United States who would understand their neighbors to the south.

Samuel Ramos’s avowed purpose is to assist in the spiritual reform of Mexico by developing a theory that might explain the real character of Mexican culture. His approach is not flattering to his fellow citizens. After an analysis of the historical forces that have molded the national psychology, Ramos concludes that the Mexican sense of inferiority is the basis for most of the Mexican’s spiritual troubles and for the shortcomings of the Mexican culture.

Ramos subscribes to neither of the two major opposing schools of thought as to what norms should direct the development of Mexican culture. He agrees neither with the nationalists, who urge a deliberate search for originality and isolation from universal culture, nor with the “Europeanizers,” who advocate abandonment of the life around them and a withdrawal into the modes of foreign cultures. Ramos thinks that Mexico’s hope lies in a respect for the good in native elements and a careful selection of those foreign elements that are appropriate to Mexican life. Such a sensible choice of foreign elements will result not in imitation, but in assimilation. Combined with the nurturing of desirable native elements, it will result in an independent cultural unit, “a new branch grafted onto world culture.”

Ramos finds in Mexico no lack of intelligence or vitality: “It needs only to learn.” And he believes that the future is Mexico’s, that favorable destinies await a Mexico striving for the elevation of humanity, for the betterment of life, for the development of all the national capacities.

Honorable Mention, Bandelier/Lavrin Book Award in Colonial Latin America, Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies (RMCLAS), 2019
Honorable Mention, The Alfred B. Thomas Book Award, Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS), 2019

Scholars have written reams on the conquest of Mexico, from the grand designs of kings, viceroys, conquistadors, and inquisitors to the myriad ways that indigenous peoples contested imperial authority. But the actual work of establishing the Spanish empire in Mexico fell to a host of local agents—magistrates, bureaucrats, parish priests, ranchers, miners, sugar producers, and many others—who knew little and cared less about the goals of their superiors in Mexico City and Madrid. Through a case study of the province of Michoacán in western Mexico, Promiscuous Power focuses on the prosaic agents of colonialism to offer a paradigm-shifting view of the complexities of making empire at the ground level.

Presenting rowdy, raunchy, and violent life histories from the archives, Martin Austin Nesvig reveals that the local colonizers of Michoacán were primarily motivated by personal gain, emboldened by the lack of oversight from the upper echelons of power, and thoroughly committed to their own corporate memberships. His findings challenge some of the most deeply held views of the Spanish colonization of Mexico, including the Black Legend, which asserts that the royal state and the institutional church colluded to produce a powerful Catholicism that crushed heterodoxy, punished cultural difference, and ruined indigenous worlds. Instead, Nesvig finds that Michoacán—typical of many frontier provinces of the empire—became a region of refuge from imperial and juridical control and formal Catholicism, where the ordinary rules of law, jurisprudence, and royal oversight collapsed in the entropy of decentralized rule.

A member of Mexico's privileged upper class, yet still subordinated because of her gender, Rosario Castellanos became one of Latin America's most influential feminist social critics. Joanna O'Connell here offers the first book-length study of all Castellanos' prose writings, focusing specifically on how Castellanos' experiences as a Mexican woman led her to an ethic of solidarity with the oppressed peoples of her home state of Chiapas.

O'Connell provides an original and detailed analysis of Castellanos' first venture into feminist cultural analysis in her essay Sobre cultura feminina (1950) and traces her moral and intellectual trajectory as feminist and social critic. An overview of Mexican indigenismo establishes the context for individual chapters on Castellanos' narratives of ethnic conflict (the novels Balún Canán and Oficio de tinieblas and the short stories of Ciudad Real). In further chapters O'Connell reads Los convidados de agosto,Album de familia, and Castellanos' four collections of essays as developments of her feminist social analysis.