Cultural History is all about researching the history to understand the “common man” better. Ethnohistory is an historical approach that is aligned with what Cultural History seeks to achieve. The article “What is Ethnohistory?: A Sixty-Year Retrospective” says that Ethnohistory is more focused on explaining the “common man’s” history of the indigenous peoples of North and South America before colonization took place in their lands, but also during the colonization periods as well. [1] The authors go on to explain that there are many other topics that contribute to the research of Ethnohistory, including agriculture, archaeology, conflict, demography, economics, environment, gender, ideology, language, migration, missionaries, political organization, race, religion, sociality, and tourism, which are all also contributing factors that make up a people’s culture as well. [2] Anthropology is the study of culture, so anthropology and Ethnohistory go hand in hand in better understanding the history of the “common man” and the authors of “What is Ethnohistory?: A Sixty-Year Retrospective” go as far to say that, “Ethnohistory combines cultural anthropology, history, archaeology, ecology, linguistics, oral traditions, and sometimes more.” [3] According to Ronald Grigor Suny in “Back and Beyond: Reversing the Cultural Turn?”, some of the challenges with using the New Cultural History or Ethnohistory approach, is that it is just one approach and that to explain the history of the “common man” other historical approaches must be considered and used to accomplish this. [4] In “Yucatec Maya Women and the Spanish Conquest: Role and Ritual in Historical Reconstruction”, Inga Clendinnen uses the New Cultural History approach to explain the initial roles of the Mayan women before and during the colonization by the Spanish. To do this, research into the Mayan culture was heavily used and emphasized to explain the life of the common Mayan woman. Despite the lack of primary resources that can be used to research this topic, Clendinnen still accomplishes this. In the article, Inga explains that “Sources need not bear directly or even obliquely on women to be revealing of their situation. By reconstructing the boundaries drawn around male activities, we may infer the definition of complementary female activity.” [5]
