Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain’s northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism.

By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristóbal Colón and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés and lesser-known writers such Álvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.

Contents

Preface: Recreating the Archive

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Introduction: The Meaning of Metals

GOLD

1. Gathering Indigenous Knowledges

2. Visual Languages of Space and Place

3. Seasons of Gold

IRON

4. Iron, Indios, and Iberian Science in Dialogue

5. Early Modern Dialogues and Colonial Knowledges

COPPER

6. Narrative Circuits of New World Copper

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

SILVER

8. Amalgamating Knowledge, Translating Empire

9. Color and Casta in the Andean Silver Industry

10. The Colonial Science of Like and Unlike

Hacia una conclusión Comparing Metals, Materials, and Ideas across Archives

Appendix 1. Chapters in d’Orta, Clusius, Fragoso, and Briganti

Appendix 2. Mining Terminology in Barba, García de Llanos, González Holguín, Bertonio, Montagu, Lange, Hautin de Villars, and Lenglet du Fresnoy

Appendix 3. Official Weights and Measures

Index

Source: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469654386/mining-language/