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Histories of colonial Latin American mining have cemented the image of a scientifically backward society whose pursuit of easy wealth sacrificed the lives of indigenous and African miners in places like Potosí. By examining a midseventeenth-century mine dispute between an Andean woman and a Spanish man, this article suggests how legal archives can reveal indigenous women's contributions to the history of colonial silver. It also provides an appendix with one hundred cases of indigenous, creole, and Spanish women miners, refiners, and managers in Alto Perú, 1559-1801, suggesting how women of different socioeconomic and technical backgrounds participated in the silver industry.

The Multepal project is an online thematic research collection devoted to the aggregation, integration, and presentation of primary and secondary sources to support the teaching and research of Mesoamerican culture. The current focus of the project is to create a digital critical edition of the Popol Wuj, or Popol Vuh, as it appears in colonial orthography, a genre-defying work from the Maya K’iche’ world that is considered one of the most important indigenous texts to survive the Spanish conquest. The Multepal edition of the Popol Wuj consists of page facsimiles, marked-up textual transcriptions (using TEI), scholarly annotations, and a linked network of characters, places, technologies, and other topics referenced in the story. These tools allow readers to understand the text in its full historical, cultural, and cosmological complexity. The project was originally developed in a graduate seminar in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. It is currently supported by the School of Data Science and the DH@UVa initiative at the University of Virginia. The project title derives from the Yukatekan word Multepal, which refers to a pre-Columbian model of collaborative political organization that the project seeks to emulate through interdisciplinarity and collaboration with early-career and established scholars in the United States and, eventually, through substantial and sustainable exchanges with colleagues in Guatemala.

Translation is often described with opposed terms like loyalty and betrayal, even though the work of translation defies such a description. New research in translation studies argues for the value of mistranslation and untranslatables, especially in recovering Indigenous knowledge production. This study joins these efforts by documenting how technical writers in the colonial Andes used Quechua terms to form a patois called “Quechuañol” (Quechua plus español) and how this hybrid Andean language was obscured in translations of scientific texts in early modern England, Germany, and France. As translators reinterpreted metallic classifications in Quechuañol, including “Pacos, Mulatos y Negrillos” (“paco, mulato, and negrillo metals”), they chose terms that communicated their own, culturally specific ideas about color and categories. Tracing mistranslations in the Atlantic world allows us to document both the Indigenous intellectual contributions to the technical arts and the development of early modern racial classifications.

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.