Allison Bigelow's monograph on colonial mining discourses is an insightful addition to a growing body of work on the emergence of early modern scientific and technological epistemologies. The book is organized into ten chapters and follows texts on gold, iron, copper, and silver. Historical linguistics, visual analysis, comparative literary interpretation, archaeometallurgy, ethnohistory, and ethnography all inform Bigelow's reading of texts in Taíno, Quechua, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin. An exemplary display of this ambitious and creative methodology is found in the first section on gold prospecting and mining on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (la Española) We learn about a puzzling 1524 petition-turned-policy, presented by a minero-encomendero, which argued for moving the gold-mining season on Hispaniola from November-December to June, when Taínos harvested a seasonal yellow plant, cañafístola. The plant was not only an important medicinal purgative adopted by colonials, but was also significant in Taíno creation myths wherein gold also figured as an important substance. The existence of such a proposal and its adoption by the crown suggest that not all decisions surrounding mining were profit-driven, but that they could also hinge on local indigenous cosmologies and ecologies.

The two chapters on iron treat the “imaginative geography that connected Asia and the Americas” and analyze the publications of a Spanish physician, Nicolás Monardes, writing from Seville, and those of a Sephardic Portuguese doctor, García d'Orta, who wrote from the colony of Goa (105). High-minded imperialists like Monardes believed that silver and gold paled when compared to the ebony sheen of iron, thus putting colonials’ gold-lust into a broader early-modern mineralogical context. Monardes and d'Orta both wrote about minerals in a dialogical format, which, Bigelow convincingly argues, gave local indigenous knowledge greater visibility, as when d'Orta's Indian interlocutors expound on local medicines. Unfortunately, the provenance of this subaltern knowledge was erased in subsequent translations and editions that converted the dialogues into natural histories, removing their multiple and local interlocutors and replacing them with one definitive, expert voice.

Even though gold and silver were preferable, colonials also possessed a copper-lust. Bigelow examines the allure of copper in two geographical contexts, La Florida and the Venezuelan town of Cocorote. The first chapter in the section follows the meandering paths that knowledge about copper wealth traveled as it moved from one text to another, specifically from Cabeza de Vaca, to the Fidalgo de Elvas (a Portuguese member of the de Soto expedition) and finally to Richard Hakluyt's English translation of Elvas. In a “colonial variation on ‘telephone,’” filtered information from entradas was reshaped by subsequent authors to paint a picture of abundance and potential colonial extraction (196). Visions of colonial grandeur are also on display in plans drawn up by the colonial projector Manuel Gaytán de Torres, who proposed a semiautonomous mining community of 710 African slaves in Cocorote. Bigelow's creative reading of Gaytán de Torres's proposal includes a beautiful watercolor painting of Gaytán's Cocorote that Bigelow and a student-collaborator, Rebecca Graham, “reconstructed” from a prose description of the lost original. The painting reveals that the colonial projector wove profit motives into a more baroque vision of a community reducido, which could draw on African mining knowledge, new Catholic sensibilities, and bodies that were accustomed to the climate of Venezuela.

Arriving finally at silver, the book performs many of the same methodological moves on display in previous sections, with excellent results. We learn, for example, that the new method of mercury amalgamation, which transformed Potosí into a viable industrial mine and envy of the imperial world, was developed in New Spain by merchant-turned-miner Bartolomé de Mina who “capitalized on imperial Mexica networks of sliver miners, refiners and trade routes,” a point of fact that was ignored by early modern authors who highlighted only the mining triumphs of colonial agents (242).

Some scholars will no doubt find the lack of narrative in this book unappealing, while others may dispute some of the book's more tentative conclusions. But this book is not interested in neat narratives and completeness; instead, it “tells a new story about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mining and metallurgical sciences—a story in which incorporation and erasure represent two sides of the same imperially minted, globally traded coin” (324). By bringing to light indigenous knowledge in imperial texts about mining technologies, this book reveals case after case of what Marcy Norton calls an “ideology of disavowal.” Bigelow displays an unquenchable tenacity for investigating the smallest and most puzzling of textual clues—clues many historians have found curious but rarely pursued—which she then triangulates with a host of other interdisciplinary evidences to illustrate the “blended concepts” and “hybrid knowledges” that constituted the scientific and technological practice of mining in Ibero-America.