This multifaceted and beautifully written ethnography of Maxcanu, a small Maya town in the Yucatan region of Mexico, offers both an historical and a contemporary understanding of the way external pressures to modernize are often met with forms of resistance that are rooted in rituals and oral tradition. The Maya of the Yucatan have long been drawn into the Mexican state's attempt to create modern Mexican citizens (mestizos). They have also been drawn into the North American and global economy through agriculture and, more recently, tourism and US-based evangelical organizations. Despite the many pressures to turn Mayas into mestizos, the citizens of Maxcanu use subtle forms of resistance, including humour, satire, and language, to maintain aspects of their traditional identity. Maya or Mestizo? skilfully weaves the history of Mexico into a compelling tale of a community caught between tradition and modernity.

In the ninth century, southern lowland Maya civilization went into a mysterious decline. Despite the wealth of information that bones could potentially provide towards explaining the collapse, bioarchaeologists have been traditionally unable to study Maya bones because the tropical climate and uninformed excavations have resulted in decomposed, poorly collected samples. But during the last twenty years, new techniques in osteology have yielded finds on Maya diet and health that challenge the accepted ecological model of overpopulation and overcultivation leading to collapse. Fifteen essays on skeltons from a wide range of sites in Mexico and Central America address such subjects as cranial deforamtion, tooth filing, damage caused by sacrificial rites and evidence of nutritional and infectious diseases. What emerges is a picture of regional variation and the importance of local context in order to reconstruct ancinet Maya culture and explain its demise.

La Ruta Maya is a 1500-mile route connecting ancient Mayan sites, and providing access to remote areas extending from Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula into the Honduras and El Salvador. In this realm of the ancient Maya, travelers will discover more cities than in ancient Egypt; remote villages where traditions and crafts have survived for 3000 years; the longest barrier reef in the Americas; and more. 16 pages of color.

From the time when archaeologists first began to discover the civilization's spectacular ruins, Mexico's Mayan past has been a boundless source of inspiration, ideas, and iconography for the modernist imagination. This study examines the ways artists, architects, filmmakers, photographers, and other producers of visual culture in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and beyond have mined Mayan history and imagery. Beginning his study in the mid-nineteenth century, with the first mechanically reproduced and mass distributed images of the Mayan ruins, and ending with recent works that address this history of representation, Lerner argues that Maya modernism is the product of an ongoing pan-American modernism characterized by a continuing series of reinterpretations, collaborations, and exchanges in which Yucatecans, Mexicans and foreigners, mestizos, Mayas, and others all participate and are free to endorse, misunderstand, reinterpret, or reject each other's ideas.