This is a book it took bravery if not foolhardiness to write. Mesoamerican arms and armour are reasonably well known from archaeological finds and artistic depictions*, but for tactics, organization, recruitment and the integration of warriors into the wider society Hassig has to build his account on decidedly shaky foundations: laconic Maya inscriptions, less well understood when this was published in 1992 than today; native traditions written down after the conquest, which may be accurate enough for the Aztec period but veer into the mythological for preceeding centuries and millennia; typological parallels; and necessarily subjective interpretations of art, which may anyway depict what should have been rather than what was.

The reader is thus well advised to take many of Hassig's specific conclusions with a helping of salt. That said, I found the book interesting enough, and a starting point for looking for more recent scholarship.

* Though even here there are important differences in interpretation. For example, a boomerang-shaped implement frequently depicted in the hands of Toltec warriors is taken by Hassig as a obsidian-edged "sword", a precursor to the Aztec macuahuitl; other scholars have interpreted it as a throwing stick, a specialized defensive tool for parrying darts, or a badge of rank without any particular practical use.