Overview

An exploration of Colombian maps in New Granada. During the late Spanish colonial period, the Pacific Lowlands, also called the Greater Choco, 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.

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9781477327746

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Wiersema’s book is a remarkable study of the long-overlooked narratives that these select manuscript maps and their documentation provide...[with] impressive interdisciplinary scope. * caa.reviews * The book brings alive a borderland...[and] paves the road for new studies that consider in more detail Indigenous and African peoples’ political projects, and how they shaped these contested landscapes. * HAHR * Wiersema does a great job distinguishing the functions of printed maps (which served imperial interests) and manuscript maps (which reveal complicated local stories with diverse actors seeking control and access to its resources). * H-Net *

Author Information

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.

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