Mary Van Buren’s book reconstructs a difficult-to-capture history: that of thousands of small-scale independent miners in the southern Andes, stretching from the present day to the Incan times. At certain points, the labor of these workers accounted for a third of all of silver produced in some of the richest mines of the world, and yet it remains challenging to tell the history of the miners because of a paucity of accurate references to their production and the technology they employed. The fact that the activities of independent mine workers were often considered illegal by formal mining operations contributes to this challenge.

The subject of Van Buren’s work speaks to issues of great scholarly interest to historians. It is closely linked, for example, to contemporary debates about the so-called Great Divergence—that is, the extent to which Europe differentiated itself from the rest of the world from the seventeenth century onward due to the Industrial Revolution. To date, this debate has principally confronted scholars working in northwestern Europe and Asia. However, Ibero-America also occupies an important place in the discussion given its centrality to European colonial empires. Indeed, part of the Great Divergence debate refers to the colonial condition of Ibero-America and affirms that colonial labor regimes—specifically, the encomienda and mita systems—ceased to exist by the nineteenth century. Instead, most scholarship has suggested that free labor relations were emergent in the seventeenth century and, in this way, approached the conditions prevailing in western Europe. On the basis of these premises, the causes of Ibero-America’s “backwardness” must be seen as rooted not in colonialism but in other historical dynamics.

Van Buren does not explicitly address these controversies. Nevertheless, her book contributes new answers to these important debates. Her book provides important insight into the real condition of small independent miners and dependent workers who often acted as kajchas (thieves) of the mines. Van Buren’s research underscores a significant issue in this respect: the precariousness of work and its compulsory nature. On the one hand, workers in colonial and republican silver mines received incomes well below the minimum levels necessary to subsist in mining centers. On the other hand, despite the fact that they were “free workers,” working conditions in the mines created other kinds of constraints and obligations—for example, permanent indebtedness and the pursuit of additional forms of family work that were intended to reduce workers’ dependence on mine owners and merchants.

The author combines her expertise in archaeology and historical anthropology with the work of ethnohistorians to paint a more complete picture of labor activity across time in the southern Andes. She pays particular attention to the mining center of Porco, located in present-day Bolivia. As Van Buren explains, the unexpected discovery of a huayrachina (an indigenous smelter) still in use near Porco and the author’s own personal experience doing research in a Bolivian mining town led her to reorient the study, as she was convinced that the pre-colonial and colonial legacy in present-day Bolivia is inescapable. In this way, the author uses both historical documents and anthropological observation to highlight historical permanencies and continuities.

The book’s focus on permanence allows us to explore the extent to which the past weighs on the present. The author uses retrospection to address the survival of traditional mining practices in Bolivian mining centers. For her, the tradition demonstrates a clear continuity in the use of technology (huayrachina) and social relations at work (the kajcha (theft) of raw metal by workers who refined it on their own). This has implications beyond the study of labor relations, as it relates also to ancestral beliefs about links between men and the interior of the earth. Far from being considered robbery, the workers considered “stealing” metal to be a popular “right” and an ethnic vindication. In the animistic worldviews of the Andes, the mines were huacas (sacred places) to which offerings were made in exchange for health, fertility, and material resources.

In conclusion, Van Buren’s research raises many good points. Her multidisciplinary methods, drawing from archaeology, historical anthropology, and ethnohistory, broaden our understanding of a complex phenomenon in Andean history. Her retrospective approach allows us to examine the continuity of the phenomenon studied and provides evidence of mine work’s precariousness throughout history. Finally, in dealing with a “marginal” mining center in southern Bolivia, the historical case studied by Van Buren allows us to better understand the situation of larger colonial and republican mining centers in the Andes. The book is recommended reading for those interested in colonial and republican Latin American labor history, particularly in light of the Great Divergence debates.