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A Brief History of Early
For three centuries, Imperial Spain mined enormous quantities of metallic ore from its American domains, particularly from the huge silver deposits of Mexico and Peru. Spanish silver mining remade the economy of the Old World and did much to create that of the New; it furthered a healthy growth in mining technology, and its infrastructure proved vital to the Latin American nations after they won independence. Despite its dark aspects, the Spanish enterprise helped make the modern world possible, and many of the great silver mines developed during colonial times are familiar to mineral collectors today.
INTRODUCTION: BEFORE 1520
Shortly before the time of Christ, Iberian Spain became one of the first major foreign conquests of the expanding Roman Republic. For the next five centuries, from mining sites now largely lost, Spain furnished silver to finance and further aggrandize the great Empire which ruled it-and a thousand years after Rome's fall, history began in a peculiar way to repeat itself. Having expelled the last of the Moors, a newly unified Spain embarked on a career of overseas conquest which yielded such wealth in metals-most of all in silver-as to revolutionize the world economy, world trade, and world politics. The growth of mining, particularly in me Mexican and Peruvian parts of the Spanish New World Empire, took not only Spain but all of Europe out of itself, and did much to create that New World Order that we call modernity.
Pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas did apparently do some metal-gathering; the first treasures sent home by the conquistadores were artifacts of gold, silver and other metals wrought by craftsmen of the Aztec, Inca and other indigenous civilizations. There was rudimentary copper mining in Chile before the Spaniards, and the Incas possessed sufficient metallurgical knowledge to make some bronze. The Aztecs had plundered metal from victims of thenown conquests, and the Huancavelica cinnabar deposit in Peru (later a linchpin of the Spanish mining system) had been worked by the Incas for cosmetic "rouge" (Waszkis, 1993). But mining in pre-conquest times was probably largely confined to sluicing for alluvial gold, and some hacking at outcrops of metalliferous veins, followed by very primitive sorts of smelting; no seriously developed underground workings seem...