The Itza Maya: Rulership and Rebellion at Lake Peten

Grant D. Jones's The Itza Maya, Rulership and Rebellion at Lake Peten, published by Stanford University Press in 1998, is the standard scholarly history of the last independent Maya kingdom, conquered by Spain only in 1697, built from Spanish colonial documents together with ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence. Jones spent decades working the Guatemalan and Spanish archival record for this period, and the book is widely cited as the reference study of Itza political history and its resistance to conquest. Its strength is that documentary depth and its university press peer review. Its limit is that colonial Spanish sources are themselves partisan documents of conquest, written to justify Spanish claims, so a reconstruction of internal Itza religious or political life drawn from them necessarily reads through that lens, a limit Jones himself is explicit about rather than one this audit is raising against him.