Event Description
For the next virtual Lunch Lecture at Science History Institute, Allison Bigelow (University of Virginia) will give a talk entitled “Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World”.
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. Indigenous, African, and mixed-race miners formed the overwhelming majority of the workforce in colonial Latin America, but the structures of white supremacy and colonial power ensured that they left little written record of their scientific and technical contributions.
Using visual analysis, historical linguistics, and translation case studies, Bigelow’s talk will outline methods of documenting indigenous knowledge production in the gold and silver industries of the 16th-century Caribbean and the 17th-century Andes. In these very different cultural, linguistic, and scientific contexts, I show how Taíno-, Quechua-, and Aimara-speaking miners influenced the technical infrastructures and material practices of one of the most lucrative and largest colonial scientific industries of the Americas.
Wednesday, December 2, 2020, 1–2pm EST
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