Apes and gods and steel oh my!

From the perspective of a person who is currently teaching the second half of the Western Civilizations class, Matthew Restall’s book Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest is quite useful.  I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I am guilty to a certain degree of unwittingly perpetuating some of the myths that Restall debunks. The technology trap is perhaps the easiest to fall into.   True, the Spaniards and their allies from across the Atlantic had steel weapons, but these did not make or break the conquest.  The sheer number of indigenes recruited and used by the Spaniards belies the faith the Spanish had in their weapons.   The superiority myth also seems particularly difficult to eradicate.   I think every special (not that I watch these sorts of things regularly) on the History channel about the conquest represents Cortez as having been the fulfillment of some vague Aztec prophecy regarding the return of a god from across the sea. Though I’m pretty much eliminating the possibility of being able to do this for this particular class, his book in itself provides the foundation for a unit studying of the conquest in an undergraduate class and might be used as an inroad to helping students question similar stories.

One final item of interest is the admittedly old idea of creating myths to explain complex historical processes. This made me think of the most modern manifestation of  Meso-American mythos: The Mayan calendar and 2012.  I wonder how this fits into the picture of Restall’s myths?