The name New Philology was coined by James Lockhart to describe work that he and his doctoral students and scholarly collaborators in history, anthropology, and linguistics had pursued since the mid-1970s.
A particularly valuable online publication is essays in which individual scholars discuss the process and product of translating and publishing particular native language documentation.
An early and important text in this vein was Nahuatl in the Middle Years (1976), published by Lockhart and University of Texas linguist Frances Karttunen.
Sarah Cline was the first to complete a dissertation in 1981, based on these types of local-level sources, a set of 60 testaments from the central Mexican Indian polity or altepetl of Culhuacán.
[16][17] Susan Schroeder delved into the rich texts produced by seventeenth-century Nahua historian, Chimalpahin, resulting in several publications [18][19][20][21] The largest number of local-level indigenous documents, such as testaments and bills of sale, are in Nahuatl, resulting in Nahuatl having the largest set of published sets of documents and monographic scholarly analyses.
Restall's UCLA 1995 dissertation "The World of the Cah: postconquest Yucatec Maya Society" was followed by his 1995 publication of a collection of eighteenth-century wills.