Beware the Great Horned Serpent!: Chiapas under the Threat of Napoleon

"Dr. Robert M. LaughIin, one of the world's greatest students of native language and culture, has produced a "historical anthropology" that is both captivating and illuminating. Like a mystery novel, the reader is led from the accidental discovery of a Tzotzil-Maya nineteenth-century text, found in the very building where Laughlin works (the Smithsonian Institution), through the bizarre and dramatic history of events surrounding the 1812 Cortes in Spain and an obscure proclamation sent to the…