Dead Giveaways
Indigenous Testaments of Colonial Mesoamerica and the Andes

Edited by Susan Kellogg and Matthew Restall

4 maps
Cloth $40.00
ISBN 978-0-87480-579-6

The essays collected here demonstrate in varied ways the importance of wills as rich ethnohistorical sources.

Last will and testaments comprise at least half of the survining documents written in indigenous languages during the Spanish colonial period. Both men and women, mortally ill, probably bedridden, participated in the will-making custom, summoning family members, close friends, perhaps business associates, and the norary, who actually wrote the dictated final statement. Whether in Nahuatl or Spanish, Mixtec or Maya, wherther in the dry flatland of the Yucatan peninsula or the west valleys of the Quito highlands, the ritual opened in the same way—“In the name of the father, the Son, and the Holdy Spirit”—and the ill and dying went on to dispose of their worldly goods.

The lists of material items sandwiched between religious and legal formulas lends these documents a straightforward and mundane appearance; however, the essays collected here demonstrate in varied and exciting ways the importance of will as rich ethnohistorical sources. In addition to providing information on families, gender roles, property holding, institutional structures, social and familial relationships, and religious beliefs and practices, the wills for a given religion provided evidence for understanding cultural change over time.

The ten contributions to this volume, which are devoted to the description and analysis of wills, aim at a wide geographic and chronological coverage, exploring a region from Central Mexico to Bolivia and spanning the period from the mid-sixteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries.