Abstract: This paper sketches a new project attempting to renew the history of extraction in the Americas broadly speaking from pre-Columbian to recent times, addressing how minerals have been conceived of differently across time and how 'mining metabolisms' have sped up or slowed down. What is to be done? Keep digging it?

 

Bio: Kris E. Lane holds the France V. Scholes Chair in Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University in New Orleans, USA. He is author of several books on gemstone and precious metals mining in early modern South America's Andes region, along with books on piracy. His latest work explores organic and mechanistic theories of Earth's subsurface workings as Latin America (and the planet) enters a new wave of scaled-up 'extractivism.'

 

M.A.R.I. Lunch Talks invite guest speakers to host seminars at M.A.R.I. on a wide variety of topics related to the archaeology, history, and ethnography of Mesoamerica and other world areas. The events typically take place on Fridays around noon and can be delivered in English and Spanish.