Climatic signatures in Yucatecan wills and death records

Abstract

Dense collections of eighteenth-century wills and death registers from Tekanto and Ixil, two towns in northern Yucatan, represent hitherto unexplored sources for documenting the relationship between natural disasters and mortality patterns among the Yucatecan Maya during colonial times. They provide detailed, sometimes daily, records of the impact of famines caused by multiyear droughts, hurricanes, and plagues of locusts on the agrarian population of the peninsula, which supplement the brief, impressionistic accounts of historians. © 2009 by American Society for Ethnohistory.