The 12 essays assembled in this edited volume demonstrate a variety of approaches to the topic of Mesoamerican painting, both before and after the Spanish invasion. Stemming from a session at the 53^rd International Congress of Americanists in Mexico City in 2009, the volume includes a well-balanced set of contributors from the United States, Mexico, and Europe. After a historiographic introduction by Merideth Paxton and Leticia Staines Cicero, the essays are organized geographically, with four essays about Central Mexico, two about Oaxaca, and five about the Maya area.

One of the strengths of the volume is how differently the scholars within it approach the evidentiary status of painted images. This is nowhere more apparent than in the first two essays, both of which consider the murals of the Atetelco apartment compound at Teotihuacan. Jorge Angulo Villaseñor and América Malbrán Porto propose a “contextual approach” to these murals in their essay, considering them as straightforward indicators of the kinds of activities that transpired in the painted rooms, and exploring the relationships between the murals and the surrounding landscape. By contrast, Davide Domenici proposes that these same paintings should be read as a very figural kind of hieroglyphic writing. Building on work by Karl Taube, Jesper Nielsen, and Christopher Helmke, among others, Domenici suggests that many of Teotihuacan's most iconic murals represent emblematic glyphic compounds rather than purely figural images.

Both content and format of painted texts are the subject of inquiry in a pair of essays about colonial-era Central Mexican manuscripts. Lori Boornazian Diel explores the contrast between the ordered prehispanic narratives of colonial manuscripts, particularly the Tira de Tepechpan, and the chaotic colonial present in which the texts were written. While Diel rightly interprets this as a rhetorical strategy and a reflection of the very real upheaval of the colonial period, I wonder whether the phenomenon she presents also has to do with historical distance: perhaps an annals-style history composed in 1400 would also have appeared chaotic, with the most significant events only recognized and rationalized with hindsight. Angela Herren studies the ways in which the handwritten Codex Aubin adopts the conventions of printed books and uses these resemblances (as well as the printed endpapers of the book, which come from a Latin edition of Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War), to argue for a relationship between the manuscript's author and the famed Colegio de Santa Cruz at Tlatelolco. One of the strongest essays in the volume, Herren's work demonstrates the payoffs of close attention to form and materiality.

The two essays dealing with painting in Oaxaca address the enduring power of naming, for both people and places. Alfonso Arellano Hernández explores practices of naming in colonial-era Oaxaca, and then proposes readings of the names painted in Tombs 103, 104, and 105 at Monte Alban centuries earlier. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Manuel Hermann Lejarazu's meticulously argued essay proposes an identification of one of the key places in Mixtec codices, “Mountain that Opens–Bee,” with “Hill of the Cicada,” or Monte Negro, near the city of Tilantongo. That this ancient place of power lay so close to its successor, Tilantongo, has important implications for the study of Mixtec history.

The essays on the Maya region showcase the greatest variety of methodological approaches and objects of inquiry. María de Lourdes Navarijo Ornelas examines representations of animals on the 553 excavated vessels published in Marta Foncerrada de Molina and Sonia Lombardo de Ruiz's 1979 catalog and compares them to representations of animals in Maya murals. María Luisa Vázquez de Ágredos Pascual and Cristina Vidal Lorenzo present preliminary findings on aromatic essences mixed with Maya pigments and body paints, drawing on ongoing archaeometric analyses of objects in the collection of the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología in Guatemala City. This exciting new line of research yields important insights into Maya cosmetic and mortuary practice and promises further revelations as even more samples are studied. Continuing the focus on multisensory engagement, Ana García Barrios considers the social contexts of food in the murals of the radial pyramid from the Chiik Nahb’ complex at Calakmul, incorporating Simon Martin's epigraphic readings with descriptions of the vessels and foodstuffs presented.

The two final essays in the volume use a broad range of comparisons to interpret Postclassic and colonial Maya painting tradition. Susan Milbrath, Carlos Peraza Lope, and Miguel Delgado Kú compare the murals of Mayapan to contemporary mural and codex painting throughout Mesoamerica, discerning significant differences in stylistic affiliation between the three most important mural programs at the Postclassic city. Merideth Paxton examines the sole image in Diego López de Cogolludo's 1688 Historia de Yucatan, discerning relationships not only to European coats of arms, but also to colonial-era k'atun wheels and prehispanic divinatory almanacs, and argues for a previously unrecognized solar-based directional symbolism in this important but understudied image.

Together, these essays demonstrate the importance of painting in Mesoamerica during both the prehispanic and colonial periods, whether on walls, ceramics, or the pages of books. Yet one weakness of this volume is that it never really interrogates the very idea of painting, taking it as a given rather than as the culturally specific and ideologically freighted practice that it necessarily is. This might have been fruitful material for the volume's editors to explore in their introduction. Still, specialists in Mesoamerican and colonial Mexican art and archaeology will find topics of interest in these pages. The one thing that detracts greatly from this volume is the inexcusably poor quality of many of the images, which are often pixelated to the point of illegibility. University of New Mexico Press should have done better by the authors of this interesting and varied collection.