In this well-researched and extensive study, William E. Hanks focuses on the process of culture change among the Yucatecan Maya in the period following the Spanish conquest and throughout the colonial period. He also observes the effects of this process of change on the unique character of the modern Maya in Yucatan. Mary Louise Pratt has described this as transculturation: a process whereby one culture adopts and adapts aspects of an alien culture into its own, using the typologies and structures of the receiving culture. Through the use of this term one seeks to replace the older term of syncretism which implied either a haphazard or uninformed process of cultural change. Hanks has divided his work into three large sections. The first of these focuses on the contact period when the arrival of Spanish missionaries and settlers began the process of cultural change among the Maya. On this he has three chapters which analyse the policy and process of reducción whereby widely dispersed native populations were concentrated, or reduced, to nucleated villages, for ease of administration and government by the Spanish. Regular territories were established, the natives then concentrated in a few towns and villages in each district. There the Spanish pursued evangelisation and indoctrination into European forms of government. The second section considers the linguistic effects of the Spanish policy of reducción. Specifically the Maya language which emerged from this experience was one which was deeply affected by the intrusion of Spanish and Latin, as the friars first learned Maya and then adopted and adapted it to their evangelical needs. Moreover this was a language which the Maya themselves developed in response to the new pressures of life in reducción. The final section considers the impact of the reduction on the dispersion of the Maya language which emerged from that experience. In this section, Hanks proposes that the natives who passed through this experience were permanently changed. While many fled from the reducciones, they carried the language and thus some of the mentalité with them. Hanks sees the creation of works such as the Chilam Balam not as evidence of the pre-Columbian past but as testimonies to the Europeanised and Christianised Maya. He then approaches these colonial works from a completely different tack from previous generations of scholars. Hanks sees the creation of a new Maya, a language and a people, who passed from the pre-contact period, though the experiences of the early colony into a future in which they used their newly adapted language for purposes ranging from contact with the colonial state to activities as subversive as the recollection of the ancient past. This is a strong case and example of transculturation.