ABSTRACT
The Spanish conquest of the Americas was largely motivated by the promise of mineral wealth, and control over the labor needed to extract ore and other natural resources shaped institutions, politics, and daily life in the colonies. This chapter provides an overview of archaeological research conducted thus far on labor and resource extraction and then offers a case study centered on Indigenous metal production in Porco, a mining center in south-central Bolivia. The application of Bertell Ollman’s method of “doing history backwards” to the long-term trajectory of small-scale mining in Porco provides an understanding of “traditional” silver production that acknowledges both continuities in Indigenous practice and changes due to transformations of the political economy.
