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John C. Super, Food, Conquest and Colonization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), pp. viii + 133.

chapters corresponding to military conquest, the establishment of colonial administration, and the conversion of the Maya respectively. The second part of the book considers the reaction of the Maya to Spanish conquest, both in the way they assessed the newcomers and in the changes they made in their everyday lives. The author ably demonstrates that the Maya were not passive victims of colonial rule, but played an active role in forging their own destinies, both by modifying their own way of life and by incorporating elements of Spanish culture. The sources available for the reconstruction of the Maya view of Spanish conquest are clearly limited, and although the author suggests that much can be gained by studying the ethnographic present, Maya hieroglyphs, including the Books of Chilam Balam, and by examining the actions of groups as expressions of shared beliefs and views of the world, inevitably the bulk of the evidence derives from highly partisan Spanish accounts. The basic source used for this section of the book is the confessions of Indians to the Provincial, Diego de Landa, who conducted an episcopal inquisition into idolatry in Yucatan in 1562. Some of the confessions, already published by Scholes and Adams, are included as examples in an appendix. The author introduces no new source material, but she re-evaluates the evidence and presents a convincing case that the confessions were concocted under stress, and that they did not, contrary to general belief, describe actual events, particularly with respect to the conduct of human sacrifice. The Indian section of the book concentrates on a discussion of changing Maya beliefs; other aspects of culture are considered only briefly, giving the book a rather narrower focus than its title might suggest. Rescuing the history of changing beliefs, particularly for a society or social group which has left few written records is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks an historian can embark upon. Clendennin's book is a brave and admirable attempt to do this. Unfortunately, Nancy Farriss's impressive study, Maya Society Under Colonial Rule, had not been published at the time of writing. This book would have provided the author with much needed background and detail on other changes to Maya society, and enabled her to situate ideological changes within a broader cultural context. Religious beliefs do not occur in isolation, but are best considered, as a number of Andeanists have done, as part of the general destructuration of Indian societies precipitated by colonial rule. Ambivalent Conquests is a beautifully written book and it is highly recommended for the general reader and the specialist, even though the latter might find it less satisfying in that it relies on a rather narrow range of published sources and makes no attempt at comparative analysis. The Maya reaction to Spanish conquest, as Nancy Farriss has shown, was in many respects different from other Indian groups, yet the question of why this was the case is not explored.