Mining Language

Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World

Allison Margaret Bigelow

• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781469654386
• eBook ISBN: 9781469654393
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

APPENDIX 1

Chapters in [García d’Orta], Colóquios dos simples e drogas e cousas medicinais da India (1563), Carolus Clusius, trans. and ed., Aromatum et simplicium aliquot medicamentorum apud Indos nascentium historia (1567), Juan Fragoso, Discurso de las cosas aromaticas, arboles y frutales y de otras muchas medicinas simples (1572), and Annibali Briganti, Due libri dell’historia de i semplici, aromati, et altre cose (1576)

APPENDIX 2

Mining terminology in Barba (1640), García de Llanos (1609), González Holguín (1608), Bertonio (1612), Montagu (1674), Lange (1676), Hautin de Villars (1730), and Lenglet du Fresnoy (1751)

APPENDIX 3

OFFICIAL WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

Currency

1 peso = 8 reales de plata or 20 reales de vellón (copper alloy)

1 real = 34 maravedís de plata

1 escudo = 350 maravedís de plata

1 ducado = 375 maravedís de plata

1 marco = 8 ounces (silver) or 50 castellanos (gold)

1 castellano = 96 granos or 8 tomínes of gold

Mineral weight (pesos)

1 onza = 8 ochavas

1 ochava = 6 tomines

1 tomín = 12 granos

1 arroba = 11.4 kilograms or 25 pounds

4 arrobas = 45.6 kilograms or 100 pounds

Sources: Joseph García Cavallero, Theorica, y practica de la arte de ensayar oro, plata, y vellon rico: Danse reglas para ligar, religar, alear, y reducir qualesquiera cantidades de oro, y plata a la ley del Reyno … (Madrid, 1713), 17–21; Michael Thomas D’Emic, Justice in the Marketplace in Early Modern Spain: Saravia, Villalon and the Religious Origins of Economic Analysis (Lanham, Md., 2014), 64–65. It goes without saying that official rates were not always respected.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

Acanthite (Ag₂S), 262

Acapulco, 250

Acosta, Cristóvão da, 156–158

Acosta, José de, 111, 121n, 247–248, 252, 291, 307n

Africa, 18, 23, 50, 55, 97, 105, 122n, 127, 169–173, 248, 288, 327–328. See also individual regions, countries, and cities

African healers, 66, 93, 224

African miners and refiners, 230, 275–276, 292, 322, 327n; women, 1, 43, 47–49, 198, 207–214, 221–225, 236, 237, 244; enslaved, 18–19, 27, 50, 56–58, 67–68, 83, 85, 96–99, 198–199, 200, 201–225, 292, 309–310, 310, 326

Agadez, 169

Agate, 282

Agricola, Georgius, 110, 141–143, 147n, 155, 232, 282, 296–298

Aguacalecuen / Aguascaleyquen. See Caliquem

Aguardiente (firewater), ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface: Recreating the Archive
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: The Meaning of Metals
• Gold
• Iron
• Copper
• Silver
• 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
• Back Cover