Two recent books provide valuable introductions to specific aspects of recent scholarship on the Maya. The Maya (subtitled “Lost Civilizations,” which is the name of the Reaktion Books series for which it was commissioned) was written by art historian Megan O’Neil, already the coauthor with Mary Ellen Miller of an excellent survey of Maya Art and Architecture (Thames and Hudson, 2014). For this new book, O’Neil has pursued a different, complementary approach. Following a pair of chapters on pre-Columbian Maya civilization, the bulk of the book is devoted to accounts of postconquest Maya history and culture, a historiography of Maya studies, and a critical appraisal of appropriations of Maya forms within modern art and popular culture. Synthesizing the growing scholarship on these topics into a very readable narrative, O’Neil has inverted the typical format of survey texts—including the equally recent publications on other world civilizations in the same series—that tend...

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