Color and Casta in the Andean Silver Industry

Amalgamation technologies allowed refiners throughout colonial Latin America to profitably extract silver from a wider variety of metals, including even the most refractory ores. These expanded processing capabilities meant that mineral classification and sorting became even more important, as metallurgists had to identify which silver metals to treat with traditional methods and which ones to refine by amalgamation. The vocabularies used to classify metals provide critical evidence of Indigenous contributions to silver refining in the seventeenth century. By tracing the incorporation and removal of Andean color and spatial vocabularies, this chapter shows how scientific writers and translators replaced Indigenous classifications of matter with a racialized language of metallic “castas” that included “pacos,” “mulatos,” and “negrillos.” The chapter concludes by suggesting how a reading of color signatures in khipus might shed light on Andean miners’ experiences in ways that traditional historiographic methods have not yet allowed.

Hacia una conclusión

This chapter reviews the major methodological and theoretical approaches used in Mining Language, at once concluding the book and gesturing toward future research directions in the fields of history of colonial science and technology and Indigenous Studies. Specifically, it reflects on the relationship between history and literary studies within these intersecting fields. By reflecting on what colonial archives say and do not say, the conclusion argues for the importance of research ethics and methods that confront, acknowledge, and respond to historical silences.

Seasons of Gold

This chapter builds from the previous two chapters and concludes the section on Gold. It uses linguistic and visual analysis to show how Taíno and Afro-Taíno understandings of the relationship between plants, metals influenced the legal codes and daily operations of gold processing in La Española. By juxtaposing colonial petitions, imperial ordinances, and Taíno oral traditions, this chapter argues for a new reading of the Afro-Taíno influences in the colonial gold industry – the very sector that epitomized the extractive nature of the early modern Spanish empire.

The Colonial Science of Like and Unlike

This chapter concludes the section on silver, and the book as a whole, by applying the translation/mistranslation method developed in earlier chapters to the theories of metallic generation and conversion that informed colonial amalgamation technologies. It begins by reviewing theories of likeness and attraction in classical natural philosophy and early modern European sources, wherein the combination of opposite forces like hot and cold, or male and female, enables matter to come into being or change shape. The chapter next analyzes how colonial miners and metallurgists reinterpreted the lessons of antiquity and made sameness into a source of metallic generation. European writers’ inability to translate these ideas suggests that the ideas that underpinned amalgamation technologies came from Indigenous mining communities.

Narrative Circuits of New World Copper

In adapting a variety of printed forms to convey their faith in untried sources of imperial wealth, colonial writers, reformers, and projectors shaped the malleable possibilities of copper into creative narrative mediums. As they told and retold stories, their own and others’, such writers build an iterative archive of maps, reports, and “true relations” that redefined the meaning of experience, eyewitness testimony, and knowledge of metals in the colonial Americas. This chapter opens the section on copper by analyzing Hernando de Soto’s search for copperworks in La Florida, as inspired by Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, narrated by Portuguese footsoldier o Fidalgo de Elvas, and translated by English polymath Richard Hakluyt.

Amalgamating Knowledge, Translating Empire

This chapter introduces the final section of the book, silver, by outlining the development of silver mining and refining in colonial Mexico and Perú. It pays special attention to the sixteenth-century technology transfer of amalgamation methods from central Mexico to Alto Perú, especially the rich deposits of the Cerro Rico of Potosí. By combining historical linguistic data and case studies of the translation and mistranslation of key technical terms used in seventeenth-century Andean metallurgy, as written in colonial sources that denied the sophistication of Indigenous science and technology, this chapter proposes a new method to document Indigenous knowledge production.

Gathering Indigenous Knowledges

By tracing moments when new terms were coined and when they began to appear in sixteenth-century books from the Caribbean, this chapter combines linguistic data and historical sources to show how Indigenous ideas of mining and metals influenced the grammar of the colonial Spanish gold industry. This approach situates Taíno metallic cosmologies within a web of human, plant, and mineral relationships. As shown by the sources analyzed in the chapter—all written, published, and circulated between 1492 and the 1530s—such relationships were both material and symbolic, mapping on to mining geographies, practices, and forms of speech.

Literary Forms, Imperial Projections, and the Limits of Possibility in Copper Colonies

This chapter builds from the previous chapter and concludes the section on copper. It focuses on proposals for asientos de minas (contracts for mines) and asientos de negros(contracts for enslaved Africans) produced in a hemispheric and transatlantic dialogue between and among officials, writers, projectors, and miners in Sevilla, Madrid, La Habana, and Cocorote, Venezuela. By showing where and how Iberian authors borrowed from each other, this chapter charts how colonial writers modified evidence to project particular visions of African slavery, artisanship, and family life, and to sell imperial interlocutors on new forms of American wealth.

Iron, Indios, and Iberian Science in Dialogue

Of the four major metals that circulated within the interconnected economies of the Old World – gold, silver, copper, and iron – only iron was not used as money. Iberian texts about iron thus look quite different from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century narrative treatments of gold, silver, and copper. This chapter analyzes imperial ideologies about the Indies, an imaginative geography and administrative framework that connected Asia and the Americas, by comparing Iberian medical dialogues about iron. This comparison suggests how studies of colonial technologies overlap and diverge with approaches in the history of medicine, and how Portuguese- and Spanish-language sources circulated in different ways throughout early modern reading publics, even when they are now collapsed into a common category of Iberian scientific writing.

Introduction

Mining in colonial Latin America and the early modern Iberian empire has been studied from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including archaeology and archaeometallurgy; philosophy; art history, visual studies, and material cultural analysis; literary studies; social, labor, legal, and economic histories; and the history of science. This book adopts a language-centered approach that incorporates methods of all of these fields, especially discursive, visual, and historical analysis. The introduction reviews current scholarship in the study of mining and argues for the importance of a new approach to the history of metals – one that centers the knowledges of Indigenous, African, and South Asian miners, refiners, and mineralogists.