The Maya: A Very Short Introduction

Written by Matthew Restall and Amara Solari

Narrated by Tim Campbell

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Nov 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781705270646

Matthew Restall

Matthew Restall is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History and director of Latin American studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the John Carter Brown Library, the Library of Congress, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has written twenty books and sixty articles and essays on the histories of the Mayas, of Africans in Spanish America, and of the Spanish Conquest. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife and the youngest of his four daughters.

Reviews for The Maya

[Francesco · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The title fooled me into thinking this was going to be an insight-less book full of obsolete notions slander and preconceptions. I was wrong, this is an up to date book that does much justice to the Maya civilization, provides deep insight and it's written in phenomenal English. In addition the narrator does an incredible job and his pronunciation of Mayan, Nahuatl and Spanish terms is outstanding.