When the Spanish colonized the Americas, they brought many cultural beliefs and practices with them, not the least of which involved death and dying. The essays in this volume explore the resulting intersections of cultures through recent scholarship related to death and dying in colonial Spanish America between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The authors address such important questions as: What were the relationships between the worlds of the living and the dead? How were these relationships sustained not just through religious dogma and rituals but also through everyday practices?...

In From Idols to Antiquity, Miruna Achim explores the origins and development of the National Museum of Mexico and the complicated histories of Mexican antiquities during the first half of the nineteenth century.