Product details
- ISBN 9781477327746
- Weight: 821g
- Dimensions: 216 x 279mm
- Publication Date: 09 Jan 2024
- Publisher: University of Texas Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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An exploration of Colombian maps in New Granada.
During the late Spanish colonial period, the Pacific Lowlands, also called the Greater Chocó, was famed for its rich placer deposits. Gold mined here was central to New Granada’s economy yet this Pacific frontier in today’s Colombia was considered the “periphery of the periphery.” Infamous for its fierce, unconquered Indigenous inhabitants and its brutal tropical climate, it was rarely visited by Spanish administrators, engineers, or topographers and seldom appeared in detail on printed maps of the period.
In this lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched volume, Juliet Wiersema uncovers little-known manuscript cartography and makes visible an unexamined corner of the Spanish empire. In concert with thousands of archival documents from Colombia, Spain, and the United States, she reveals how a "periphery" was imagined and projected, largely for political or economic reasons. Along the way, she unearths untold narratives about ephemeral settlements, African adaptation and autonomy, Indigenous strategies of resistance, and tenuous colonialisms on the margins of a beleaguered viceroyalty.
Juliet B. Wiersema is an associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the author of Architectural Vessels of the Moche: Ceramic Diagrams of Sacred Space in Ancient Peru.
