Ingenios and ingenuity: rethinking Indigenous histories of silver in the colonial Andean mining industry

Abstract

Silver amalgamation technologies revolutionized the production of precious metals in the colonial Andes and throughout Latin America, changing the region and the global economy in ways that are almost impossible to fully comprehend even today. We know a great deal about the productive capacity of Potosí's amalgamation refineries (ingenios), but little of other aspects of workers' experiences within those walled environments. Most archaeological studies of ingenios focus on their material cultural remains; most literary studies of ingenio analyze the term's resonance within the conventions of baroque aesthetics. By combining methods of archaeological and literary study, this article sheds light on understudied aspects of family life, clandestine silver production, and definitions of scientific knowledge in the colonial Andean silver industry. Doing so enables us to tell a richer, more complete, and more complex story of the silver that circulated as coins within the global reaches of the early modern Spanish empire.