ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Pallaña: Andean Miners as Mineral Collectors in 18th-Century Alto Perú

• In Event: Heavens, Earth, and Water in the Early Modern Iberian World

English Abstract

“After they take the ore from the mine to the yard,” wrote Manuel de Portillo Haedo in 1753, “they have to sort and separate the purest metal from the inferior ore and the rubble, [a process] which they call pallar in the Indigenous language.” This corregidor from Alto Perú (Bolivia) wrote in response to a 1752 royal order for subjects of the Spanish Empire to fill the newly founded Royal Cabinet of Natural History (RGHN). Before the RGHN turned to scientific expeditions later in the century, this order mandated that local officials like Portillo collect both mineral specimens and detailed information about mines, which they compiled in shipment catalogs, now stored in Spain’s Archivo General de Indias. One such catalog contains this reference to pallar, from pallaña (Aymara) or pallay (Quechua), verbs that refer both to the action of collecting or harvesting, usually from the ground, and to sorting or classifying a harvest’s bounties, whether agricultural or mineral. Pallaña, then, is to collect the (sub)terranean. In this paper, I use descriptions of Indigenous language, knowledge, and labor in these shipment catalogs to recover an Andean epistemology of collecting in Alto Perú. Ultimately, I argue that because the RGHN delegated mineral collecting to local miners during the 1750s, it enabled the region’s primarily Indigenous miners to exert considerable influence over the early museum. Thus, the study of natural history, museums, and collections contributes fruitfully to the growing historiography that recognizes Indigenous agency in mining, even amidst the violence of colonial extraction.

Author

• Annelise Walker, Pennsylvania State University