Law and Politics in Aztec Texcoco (Cambridge Latin American Studies) Book

This is a place holder, really. I don't have any good reason to believe this is the book I read, it's just that I don't know which book it was — my notes say simply "February 1993 — Maori — Anderson?".

February 1993 was when I began a three-month visit to New Zealand, and I picked up a good paperback history while I was in Auckland, before heading down to spend the rest of the visit on the South Island.

Among the tidbits I learned was the fact that the Maori were masters of guerrilla warfare long before anyone in the west had coined the term. The stealth tactics that were sometime practiced by the Native Americans against the interlopers in North America were similar, but less violent and less consistently practiced. Inter-tribal warfare had been a lethal game there for a long time before the British arrived in their colonial attempt, and they were tactically outclassed for quite a while.

There was a lot of other stuff, but the military history is what stuck in my brain. I suspect I left the book at some hostel in Dunedin before heading out on another backpacking trip.

(Atholl Anderson has quite a few books covering this part of the world, but a search through his stuff on Worldcat didn't reveal any likely contenders. Oh well.)
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