In Return to Ixil: Maya Society in an Eighteenth-Century Yucatec Town, ethnohistorians Mark Christensen and Matthew Restall synthesise several decades of collective experience studying colonial society in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. Born of long-standing intellectual cooperation, the volume is also the product of individual persistence and sheer happenstance, as the authors note in their introduction. In 1995, Restall published a collection of over 60 testaments from the Yucatec Maya community of Ixil that were recorded between 1765 and 1768 (Life and Death in a Maya Community: The Ixil Testaments of the 1760s, Labyrinthos). Over two decades later, Christensen happened upon a set of more than three dozen additional wills, most of which were penned in 1748. In total, then, Return to Ixil considers over 100 documents recorded in that village between 1738 and 1779, the second-largest body of colonial testaments from the Yucatan peninsula by quantity and the richest in terms of contents.

This extensive corpus allows the authors to present a multigenerational picture of social change and continuity in this small but illustrative coastal community. Reflecting recent developments in ethnohistory and the book's collaborative origins, Return to Ixil does not, however, simply present the wills as self-explanatory sources nor merely supplement Restall's earlier publication. Instead, the authors carefully weave an ‘illustrative social history’ of eighteenth-century Ixil that highlights ‘the everyday life of families in the town’ (p. 9). Their work thus reflects an ongoing development in twenty-first-century Mesoamerican ethnohistory by treating notarial documents as rich sources of social and cultural insights, rather than dismissing them as dry legal briefs in favour of more narrative texts.

Following an introduction that narrates the project's years-long gestation, Chapter 1 initiates the social history of Ixil by focusing on notaries themselves, who are often overlooked even by historians who closely study their written products. Importantly, Christensen and Restall go beyond a straightforward social analysis of the notaries’ identities, status and training background. In addition, they offer a close reading of the wills’ preambles, whose content was largely religious, to understand the variable influence that notaries and testators exercised on each will's form and content. Notarial composition in Ixil thus emerges as a more collaborative effort than is usually assumed.

Chapter 2 considers another understudied aspect of colonial Mesoamerican society with significant consequences for understanding indigenous engagement in colonial governance, namely the role of local communities like Ixil in militarily defending Spain's American colonies. To date, ethnohistorians have assembled substantial evidence of indigenous participation in the sixteenth-century conquests that granted Spain an initial foothold in the region. Yet little is known about how that control was maintained locally over the long term in the face not only of indigenous resistance but also of threats from other European imperial powers. The case of Ixil suggests, in fact, that local military service was a significant source of social capital and inextricably bound up in the village's political structure.

In Chapter 3, the authors turn to perhaps the most obvious social insight that wills provide: the economic lives of testators and their affiliates. The wills of all but the poorest residents of Ixil enumerated the testator's land, livestock, household items and other goods that were to be distributed among designated recipients. Beyond indicating the testator's own standing, the distribution requested of her or his possessions paints a picture of a community economically dominated by nobles and engaged in both Spanish and traditional Maya modes of production.

Christensen and Restall continue their social history of Ixil with discussion of local religious practices in Chapter 4. From the early sixteenth century the Yucatan peninsula was predominantly evangelised by Franciscans, and this long-standing Catholic influence can be seen in the Ixil wills in religious objects bequeathed to survivors or allocations for masses or ecclesiastical donations. Interestingly, the authors analyse friars’ signatures in wills and other ecclesiastical records to argue that eighteenth-century Ixil had regular but periodic access to travelling clergy, meaning that Catholicism was maintained by local practitioners rather than external imposition.

Finally, Chapter 5 concludes with a consideration of the larger, familial contexts that the Ixil testaments reveal. The wills’ temporal breadth allows the authors to identify long-term gender preferences in bequests – house lots and animals generally went to male family members, household tools to women, for instance – as well as marital patterns, which support a more nuanced understanding of the role of lineage in marriage choices. Although the body of the book consists of social analysis, transcriptions and English translations of all 109 Ixil testaments are provided in Appendix B, whose page count eclipses the introduction and five chapters combined.

One danger of focusing on highly local documents such as testaments is that the historical analysis takes on a similarly myopic stance. Although their text is nonetheless sprinkled with colourful anecdotes about individual testators or their families, Christensen and Restall deftly avoid this pitfall by drawing on their extensive knowledge of larger Yucatecan society and comparisons with colonial Central Mexico and, to a limited extent, Guatemala. For example, they observe that provisions for posthumous rites or burial treatment in the Ixil wills were much more modest than in surviving testaments from Central Mexico or Peru – a comparison that could, upon further study, reflect differences in indigenous mortuary traditions or experiences of evangelisation.

This comprehensive approach allows the authors to not simply paint a detailed picture of eighteenth-century Ixil society but to contextualise it. They note features that Ixil shared with or set it apart from its contemporaries, for instance, and thus highlight what their local study contributes to a broader understanding of colonial Mesoamerica. By combining detailed ethnohistorical analysis with an invaluable corpus of primary sources, Return to Ixil thus appeals to a broad readership that encompasses not only specialists in Mayan language and culture, but also scholars of colonial-period Mesoamerica and of comparative economic or social history more broadly.