The history of a periphery : Spanish colonial cartography from Colombia's Pacific lowlands

Author / Creator

Wiersema, Juliet B., 1967- author

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Summary

"Wiersema examines a group of maps from a remote gold-mining region in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia, known in the colonial period as New Granada. Although it was discovered in the early sixteen...

"Wiersema examines a group of maps from a remote gold-mining region in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia, known in the colonial period as New Granada. Although it was discovered in the early sixteenth century, the topography of mountains, heavy rivers, and dense jungles made it difficult to traverse and virtually impossible to establish urban centers from which to govern the area--the nearest ones such as Cartagena often took weeks if not months of overland travel to reach. While gold, extracted from rivers in the Pacific lowlands, was a major source of revenue for the Spanish Crown, it remained a region that was difficult to control. Maps of these areas were made at a time when the indigenous populations in these lands were being decimated, which allowed the Spanish Crown to claim, partition, and distribute territory as private property. It was not long before territorial disputes in this mineral-rich land became prevalent, and maps accompanied written legal appeals to negotiate these claims. Many of these maps survive today in the national archives of Colombia, but few have been published or studied systematically. These maps documented the land titles that their owners held, along with routes of communication and the locations of mines and haciendas. These maps also identify the settlements of free Africans, while others locate the existence of unincorporated indigenous groups and thus reveal how contact with European diseases caused their numbers to decline. By combining these maps with eighteenth-century archival documents, nineteenth-century explorer accounts, and more recent historical maps, Wiersema reconstructs this remote and yet economically important corner of New Granada"--

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