Dillon Crockett's Reviews > The Maya: A Very Short Introduction

At the recommendation of The Bamboo Traveler, whose web page "18 Must-Read Books About the Maya: For Novices and Nerds" suggests starting here when studying the Maya, I paused my reading of Michael Coe and Stephen Houston’s The Maya to work through this book instead. This was probably a decent decision. I appreciate the level of generalization this book provides as it outlines the historical periods of the Maya (really until the present day) and paints some of the relevant themes of studying the Maya, including their daily life, their politics, their art and architecture, their cosmogony and religion, and their relationship with their physical environment. Because the book touches each topic so briefly and quickly, I feel like I could have read this book twice and picked up just as much in the second read as the first. I think a downfall of many of the Very Short Introductions is that I always wish there were more visuals (more regional maps, local maps, diagrams of architecture, examples of art), but those are a promise of other, lengthier texts, not this one. This text delivers on its promise in providing a useful, intelligible overview of the Maya.