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DAVIKEN STUDNICKI-GIZBERT AND DAVID SCHECTER

the environmental dynamics of a colonial fuel-rush:

SILVER MININGAND DEFORESTATION IN NEW SPAIN, 1522 TO 1810

ABSTRACTThis essay is part of a larger project that investigates the environmental effects ofmining in Mexico. Although mining played a critical role in the economic, political,and social development of Spanish American colonies, and although it has con-sequently received extensive attention by historians, there exists no seriousstudy of its environmental dimensions. The study establishes the overall

rhythms and scales of fuel wood consumption

the main source of energy forsilver smelting and refiningfor mining districts located along the length ofNew Spain (Chihuahua to Taxco) from the beginning of colonial mining (1522) tothe turn of the nineteenth century. It also details the more local environmentaldynamics of mining, describing the practice of charcoal-making, its connectionwith emerging pastoralism and agriculture, and its social and ethnic dimensions.

LESS THAN A DECADE after colonial mining began in New Spain, Viceroy

Antonio de Mendoza was forced to issue what were possibly the first colonial

ordinances limiting forest clearing in the Americasthese were for the mines

of Taxco in 1542. Some years later the viceroy explained why: In just a few

years a large area of forest was destroyed, he wrote, and it was feared that

the woods would be finished sooner than the ore.1 The depletion of fuel

wood was a serious problem for colonial mining operations, hence the

Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert and David Schecter, The Environmental Dynamics of aColonial Fuel-Rush: Silver Mining and Deforestation in New Spain, 1522 to 1810,

Environmental History 15 (January 2010): 94119.doi:10.1093/envhis/emq007

2010 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the AmericanSociety for Environmental History and the Forest History Society. All rights reserved.For Permissions, please email: [email protected]

atUNAMDireccionGeneraldeBib

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urgency to act on the part of royal officials. Without fuel the foundry fires would

go out and the processing of metals would come to a full stop. This was a real

threat. In the seventeenth century, for instance, lack of fuel shut down the oper-

ation of numerous foundries in Parral, Chihuahua, triggering an exodus of

miners. The lack of charcoal, wrote Governor Enrique Davila Pacheco in

1654, is emptying the Real (mining district)soon it will be finished.2

The scouring of the forests that covered the hill country around Taxco in the

early 1540s was only the beginning of a much larger phenomenon of

mining-driven deforestation in Mexico. Rapid deforestation and the exhaustion

of local fuel wood supplies would be repeated all along New Spains mining belt,

from the mines of central Mexico (Taxco, Rio Sultepec, Ixmiquilpan), to the

great mining cities of the near north (Zacatecas, San Luis Potos,

Guanajuato), and further north again in the borderland mining districts of

Durango, Chihuahua, and Sonora.3

This article explores the ecological dynamics, human and physical, of

mining-driven deforestation in colonial Mexico. Surprisingly, this issue has

not received sustained attention from environmental historians.4

The existing

literature on the effects of colonial mining has focused mainly on the related,

and important, matter of mining waste and contamination; that is, on the

environmental effects of its by-products.5

Focusing on colonial mining is impor-

tant because it consumed biomass on an unprecedented and unequalled scale

for the period. From the early sixteenth century to the turn of the nineteenth

century, the mines of New Spain produced close to fifty thousand metric tons

of silver, close to eight hundred tons of gold, other metals such as lead and

copper, as well as the various other metallic compounds used in mining pro-

cesses. New Spain accounted for half of the total precious metal production

of the Americas and 40 percent of the worlds silver supply in the early

modern period.6

To produce each unit-weight of refined metal required the

input of large amounts of heat. Prior to the early twentieth centurywhen

coal, hydroelectricity, and cyanidation amalgamation were introducedthis

heat was derived from the combustion of wood or charcoal, which in turn was

obtained from the forests surrounding different mines. The combination of

the overall scale and energy intensity of colonial Mexican mining placed it

among the most important agents of biomass consumption in the early

modern Atlantic world.

In New Spain, smelting greatly outpaced other fuel wood usages such as

domestic heating, or lime- and brick-making. The amount of biomass burned

for domestic purposes was something on the order of five kilograms of firewood

per person-day according to Sherburne Cook.7

At these levels, a single mine

could consume well over twenty times the amount of fuel-wood burned by a

town of five- to six-thousand inhabitants.8

By the late eighteenth century,

New Spains silver industry greatly outpaced other metal processing industries

in Europe. It surpassed the consumption rates of the English iron-making

industry by a factor of three. This was the same industry that helped render

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England the least wooded country of the European forest zone (5 percent wood

cover) by the end of the eighteenth century.9

A closer examination of New Spanish mining and deforestation may help

one better understand similar dynamics that unfolded elsewhere in Spanish

and Portuguese America. The environmental impacts of mining in the early

Americas were hardly limited to New Spain. During Brazils gold rush, large

swathes of forest in Minas Gerais were cleared for fuel wood and timber.10 At

the mines of Potos, high in the central Andes, thousands of huayras, the

small windblown furnaces used by indigenous Andeans, covered the flanks of

the Cerro Rico. Lit at dusk to catch the local katabatic winds, these ovens

turned night into day, according to one Spanish observer. The voracious appe-

tite of the huayras and the larger smelters run by Spanish foundry men quickly

stripped the local landscape of its quishar trees, resinous llareta plants and

even tussock grasses. By the 1590s the smelters of Potos were forced to pro-

vision themselves with charcoal hauled from as far as eighty leagues away.11

Other examples of how metal processing denuded local landscapes also can

be found well after the colonial period. During the 1880s bonanza at

Tombstone, Arizona, woodcutting depleted forest stands within a sixty kilo-

meter radius of the mines.12

By 1902, the copper mine at Nacozari in northern

Sonora, Mexico, had consumed more than 5,300 square kilometers of vegetation

from its environs.13

Finally, assessing the scale and the historical dynamics of colonial minings

environmental effects helps broaden the discussion surrounding the environ-

mental transformations wrought by Spanish and Portuguese colonization in

the Americas. The debate is long-standing and complex, but it is fair to say

that it has principally revolved around the question of whether the arrival of

Luso-Iberian conquerors and settlers degraded the existing environments of

the continent. Recently environmental historians and historical geographers

have helped nuance this debate and give it the complexity it deserves by illus-

trating the degree to which precolonial peoples interacted with and reshaped

the natural environment.14

In this view, postconquest environmental change

is not so much a matter of degradation as reconfiguration. The historical geo-

grapher Karl Butzer characterizes it as a transfer and superimposition of the

Mediterranean agro-system upon the existing Mesoamerican system. He finds

that the resulting system was productive and sustainable over the long term

and was beneficial to colonized and colonizer alike.15

Incorporating colonial mining into this portrait of environmental change

shifts the terms of the discussion considerably. To begin, minings geography

was distinct. The greater part of New Spains mining belt was located to the

west and north of the highlands and coastal regions of central Mexican that

have hitherto occupied scholars attentions. In central Mesoamerica, colonial

land use change modified existing agrarian patterns only partially. The incor-

poration of new crops, techniques, and livestock was heavily modulated by

engagement with local peoples, agrarian practices, and landscapes. Moreover,

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because of the collapse of the regions numerous and densely settled popu-

lation, Mesoamericas cultivated surface area substantially diminished in the

years following the Spanish invasion. For some two hundred years the impact

of humans on the environment lessened dramatically until demographic recov-

ery began in the eighteenth century.16

The extraction of gold and silver, on the

other hand, moved the development of colonial society into territories predomi-

nantly occupied by nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples. Given its need for fuel

wood, mining did not so much modify local landscapes as scour them. This had

critical consequences for existing human ecologies, since local peoples essen-

tially lost a fundamental part of their natural-resource base. Mining also

fuelled the development of new and more intensive forms of land use such as

pastoralism and agriculture. The spread of ranches and fields in and around

colonial Mexicos mining districts foreclosed on the regeneration of forests

and their associated ecosystems.

We argue here that the development of mining in New Spain was a key agent

in a radical transformation of existing physical and human ecologies across an

enormous territory. It did so directly (in that forest removal contributed to soil

erosion, aridification, and thus the formation and spread of scrub and grassland

ecologies) as well as indirectly (by enabling the development of a new colonial

agro-ecology based on agriculture and pastoralism). The following pages

develop this argument by detailing the scale, cadence, and dynamics of

mining-driven deforestation before turning to its effect on the human and bio-

physical environments surrounding the different mining districts of Mexico.

THE MINING BELT OF NEW SPAIN: GEOGRAPHY,ECOLOGY AND HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

THE GEOGRAPHICAL DEVELOPMENT of New Spains mining industry was pre-

dominantly northwesterly, following the silver and gold deposits situated along

the flanks of the western and eastern Sierra Madre with occasional forks along

the traverse sierras of central Mexico and the Mexican volcanic belt.17

In its

heyday in the late eighteenth century, New Spains mining sector counted

some 450 different mining settlements ranging from the great mining cities

of Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potos to smaller towns and camps in

dispersed across the mountains and semiarid plains of central and northern

Mexico. What was striking about the development of New Spanish mining

was the degree to which it unfolded within an area of shared topographical, cli-

mactic, and biotic characteristics. Almost all of New Spains mines were estab-

lished in high hill country or mountain slopes and valleys. Yearly precipitation

averages dropped markedly in this area. Months of intense sunshine with little

to no precipitation were punctuated by one or two brief rain seasons character-

ized by short and intense downpours. Topography bore strongly upon the local

climactic patterns of the region as elevation gains meant lower average





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temperatures and increased yearly precipitation averages.18

This led to the ver-

tical stratification of different ecologies.

The flat-floored valleys of the Mexican altiplano and the desert plains

further to the north were characterized by sparse vegetation, either mattoral

composed of patches of spiny shrubs, succulents (agave, prickly pear, yucca

palms), and small deciduous trees, or the typical thin covering of microfilia

and cacti that typify the northern Mexican desert. In areas of relatively

higher precipitation these plains were intermittently populated by stands of

riparian forests made up of willows, mesquites, and cottonwoods.19

Moving

up the slopes into the chaparral zone, the ligneous vegetation cover increased

both in overall density and in the size of the dominant species, especially

shrub oaks. Higher still shrub oaks gave way to the oak and pine-oak forests

that characterized the monte. Finally, at the highest elevation, were stands of

pines.20

The interplay between topography, climate, and plants created forest

islands, large patches of forested highland massifs surrounded by mattoral or

desert plains that were lightly stocked with ligneous materiala key matter

when assessing the overall area of fuel wood clearing, as we shall see.21

FUELING THE MINES OF NEW SPAIN

SILVER MINING IN NEW SPAIN was an industry operating in a world without

iron and steel or coal and electrical energy. Consequently it was deeply reliant

on wood for building and heat. Wood and fire were applied throughout the

mining process, from the moment the ore was removed from the ground to its

transformation into silver of mintable grades. Timbers of oak, mesquite, and

pines provided the shorings for kilometers of tunnels and adits; for the

cut-rung chicken ladders angled against the shaft walls; for the construction

of buildings, mills and malacates (shaft winches) as well as other machinery.22

Tejamaniles or shakes commonly dressed the roofs of the mining districts.23 But

the most important use of wood, by far, was for heat. Setting aside the firewood

consumed for heating, cooking, and boiling by the miners, wood or charcoal was

used to produce heat at numerous points along the extractive process. Fires were

set inside the mines against ore veins to crack and loosen them with their heat.

Once extracted, the ore was roasted to make its milling easier. Reagents such as

magistral (copper-iron sulfite or chalcopyrite) also had to be pre-roasted to

become fully effective. Charcoal combustion was then use to produce the high

temperatures needed for smelting or was used to accelerate the mercury amal-

gamation process. Other ovens burned off the mercury from the amalgam to

recover the silver. Fire was used a last time to refine the metal to assay grade.24

Most of the silver produced by these mines was tithed and registered in the

accounts of the Cajas Reales (Royal Treasury Houses), allowing historians to

assess the rhythms and even the overall volume of silver production in New

Spain. Archival documents relating to the operations of colonial Mexican smelters

coupled with contemporary field observations of composition and wood-stocking

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in different Mexican forests render a reasonable estimate of how much forest land

was cleared by silver production on average: 6,332 m2

per kilogram of silver (see

Appendix 1). When this ratio is applied to the silver production figures gathered

from the Cajas Reales, they show that a considerable amount of the viceroyaltys

territory was cleared to smelt silver, some 315 642km2

for the period 1558 to

1804just a bit more than the surface area of the contemporary states of

Poland or Italy. The major impact was felt in the eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries, when 70 percent of this total (223,765 km2) was felled. The most impor-

tant regions of forest clearing were in the regions around Zacatecas (67,854 km2)

and Guanajuato (56,483 km2).25

Together with San Luis Potos, these mining

regions created an important cluster of intensive forest clearing activity in the

central part of New Spain. The accompanying figure provides a visual represen-

tation of the geographical scales involved (see Figure 1).

The figures for silver production derived from the Cajas Reales do not include

silver that was never tithed and remained unrecorded. Certain observers esti-

mated that as much as one-third went unaccounted for.26

Moreover, from an

environmental perspective, obtaining a rough measure of this unaccounted pro-

duction is not the only important issue at stake. Unregistered silver production

occurred within an informal mining economy of small producers, many of

whom were mine workers who refined the ore taken as their partidotheir

share of the weeks ore. They extracted the silver by smelting because access to

Figure 1. Fuel Wood Consumption in New Spain, 1550-1810.

Estimates produced by the authors.

The circular areas shown here provide a general measure of the territory affected by mining-drivendeforestation. In reality deforested areas would be less contiguous and would be found at muchgreater distances from mines and smelters.





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mercury was essentially restricted to the owners of the larger Haciendas de

Beneficio (smelters). Artisanal operators worked small furnacestochinombos or

cendradillasthe Mexican equivalents of the huayras used by Aymara and

Quechua foundrymen in the Andes. For reasons of design, these small and

uncapped furnaces were less efficient than large furnaces.27

Since each unit of

silver produced in this way consumed more fuel wood, the environmental

impact of the estimated twelve thousand metric tons produced in artisanal foun-

dries was all the greater. Converted into cleared surface area values this would

add at least 76,000 km2

of deforested land area, bringing the total to 391,650 km2.

Even if we hold to the official figures for our calculations, the actual area of

landscape affected by fuel wood consumption was more extensive and less

homogeneous than the circles charted in the accompanying figure would

suggest. The Cajas tithed silver production that took place in the various

mining centers scattered around its jurisdiction. The Caja de San Luis Potos,

for instance, recorded silver production for the mines at the Real de Catorce,

some 180 kilometers away; the Caja at Zacatecas gathered figures for

Mazapil, 225 kilometers away. A more accurate image would be of some 450

rings of deforestation, one for each mining center, with differing radii accord-

ing their production figures. Since data from the individual mines were unavail-

able, we centered the radii of deforestation on the Cajas.

Second, the forests of the New Spanish mining belt did not cover the land in

an equal and contiguous way. Carboneros (charcoal makers) supplying the

mines moved from forest island to forest island skipping over the plains and

deserts where ligneous material was scarce. Thus while the production

figures for a given mining center render a hypothetical radius of deforestation,

the actual location of the forests that were cleared extended well beyond that

line. The historical geographer Conrad Joseph Bahre called the zone affected

by fuel wood consumption a woodshed. Briefly put, because tree islands

occupy only a portion of the surrounding territoryin the case of Bahres

study of Arizona it was 17 percentthe wood shed of a given mining center

would have covered far more ground than our deforestation radii suggest.28

THE MICROHISTORY OF A FUEL RUSHTHEVALLEY OF SAN LUIS POTOS

THESE ESTIMATES ARE USEFUL in establishing an overall sense of the mag-

nitude of impact incurred by mining, but they gloss over the internal dynamics

of mass fuel wood consumption. To illustrate these we present here a condensed

regional history of fuel wood consumption for the valley of San Luis Potos.

Focusing on this circumscribed territory allows a finer examination of the tem-

poral, spatial, and environmental dimensions of the issue.

The valley of San Luis Potos is one of a string of flat, undrained, Tertiary-era

lake beds that stretch north from Queretaro. The valley floor is situated at

1,800m and is ringed by a set of sierras (Sierra Alvarez, Sierra San Miguelito,

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Sierra El Mastrante) whose peaks rise up a further 800m to 1,000m. Their

mountains are the unglaciated formations typical of north-central Mexico,

whose valleys were cut by the erosive action of the intermittent streams and

rivers that flow into the valley of San Luis. Juan de Andrade, an early

Spanish settler in the area, described these highlands as, a very rough and

bitter land, enclosed by sharp peaks.29

From the documents associated with the early Spanish settlement of San

Luis Potos it appears that the precolonial vegetation cover of the valley

matched the general patterns observed across the larger expanse of the New

Spanish mining belt. An excellent historical representation of this ecology is

the Plan de San Miguel y San Felipe, housed at the Real Academia de Historia

of Madrid. The map is believed to have been produced in the 1580s, during the

frontier wars between the Spaniards and the various nomadic and semi-nomadic

groups of the region commonly known as the Chichimecas.30

It depicts the zone

thirty kilometers to the southwest of the valley of San Luis. The ecological detail

given in the map is quite remarkable (see Figure 2). The artist has captured the

topographical gradation of the areas vegetation through different tones of beige,

tan, olive and green that match the progression of matorral to oak shrub to

oak-pine forests. Superimposed upon these are more precise representations

Figure 2. Plan de San Miguel y San Felipe, ca. 1580s.

Real Academia de Historia, Madrid.

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of identifiable plant species: maguey and prickly-pears in the valleys, willows

lining the edges of river valleys, oaks and pines in the highlands. The general

pattern laid out in the Plan de San Miguel y San Felipe is borne out in more dis-

crete references to local vegetation that can be recovered, here and there, in the

archival documents relating to the early colonization of the valley of San Luis.

Settlers describe numerous and large stands of willows and poplars growing

around the rivers and intermittent streams or springs in and around the

valley.31

Local toponyms include sierra de Pinos (Pine mountains), Hacienda

de Alameda (Poplar Hacienda), minas del Palma (mines of the Yucca), each

situated at the appropriate elevation for the plant species mentioned.32

The Spanish settlement of San Luis Potos began in earnest in 1592 with the

discovery of significant gold and silver deposits at the Cerro de San Pedro, on the

eastern edge of the valley. By early December of 1593, no fewer than nineteen

foundries and mills had been established to process and refine the ore of the

Cerro de San Pedro. Only one of these, the hacienda de beneficio of Hernn

Prez de Cabaas, was established in the immediate vicinity of the mine

head.33

The rest were clustered at the center of the valley of San Luis Potos,

or in the adjacent highland valleys of Monte de Caldera and San Francisco.

The geographic dispersion of the various pieces of the mining process extended

minings impact over the territory. Some forty years later, in the early 1630s, the

number of haciendas de beneficio in the area had more than doubled to fifty.34

The geographical dispersion of silver smelting continued as new smelting

centers were established to the east in the valley of Armadillo and to the south-

west in Bledos. Applying the same ratios obtained above of 6332.8 m2 of forest

cleared per kilogram of silver produced, we estimate that the valley of San Luis

lost some 126 km2

of forest cover every year.

The carboneros undoubtedly began with what was immediately at hand: the

riparian forests close to the mills and foundries at the center of the valley of San

Luis, Monte Caldera, and the valley of San Francisco. Since charcoal can be

made readily from shrubs and certain species of succulents, one can reasonably

imagine carboneros then turning to other forms of ligneous material that might

satisfy the foundries need for charcoal. In the town of Jalostotitln just south of

the mining center of Zacatecas (to the northwest of San Luis Potos) Alonso

Mota y Escobar noted that carboneros readily burned yucca and chaparral

brush for charcoal when local timber stands had been depleted.35

Whether in

San Luis Potos, Zacatecas or other mining centers, the net effect was a land-

scape thoroughly scoured of all available ligneous matter.36

In general, however, the lower plains and valleys of the area rendered only a

small portion of charcoal-making material. The real focus of the carboneros

attentions was aimed higherat the monte where abundant highland oak and

pine-oak forests draped the hills and mountains of the region. Clearing at the

rate of 126 km2 per year, the carboneros of the area moved quickly across the

land, finishing the slopes facing the central valley of San Luis Potosi, Monte

Caldera, and the valley San Francisco in a matter of years. They then directed





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their energies further afield, supplying San Luis from forests located in

Armadillo (thirty kilometers away), Santa Maria del Rio (forty-six kilometers

away) and Charcas (one hundred kilometers away).37

As early as 1614two

decades after the discovery of silver and gold at the Cerro de San

Pedrocarboneros were cutting into timber stands located in remote highland

valleys as far as 120 kilometers away.38 These figures compare with or greatly

exceed the estimated radius of thirty-one kilometers of cleared forest area by

1614 derived from our ratios and Garners production data. By the 1630s and

1640s travelers to the valley noted the disappearance of the valley s forests

and described a landscape without tree or vegetation, save a few surviving

yuccas upon the bald hills39

(see Figure 3).

Such observations were made a decade after mercury was introduced on a

large-scale basis to San Luis Potos. The arrival of mercury in the region

bears upon the issue of mining and fuel consumption in interesting ways.

Mercury was the central ingredient in the new amalgamation process developed

by Bartolom de Medina in the sixteenth century. The technique was developed

in part as a means of recovering silver from lower grade ores but also a response

to increasing fuel wood scarcity.40

The application of mercury, Medina

Figure 3. Fuel Wood Consumption and Deforestation in the Valley of San Luis

Potos, 15911621.

Map produced by the authors.

Topography and climate created forest islands above the scrub plains of the valley of San LuisPotos. Within thirty years of the beginning of mining operations at the Cerro de San Pedro,charcoal-makers had cleared over half of the available forests in the area.





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promised, would allow silver to be extracted without charcoal or firewood.41

This

was, of course, an important attraction to refiners in the mining centers of

Spanish America where the effects of deforestation were beginning to be felt

in the form of higher charcoal prices.

Bartolom de Medina was absolutely correct to argue that mercury amalga-

mation had the potential to allow refiners to break their dependence on fuel

wood. As it turned out, however, the advent and spread of mercury amalgamation

did not drop fuel wood consumption rates as measured by unit of time (rather

than as measured by unit of silver weight produced). It had little impact on

the intensity of consumption. A chemical process, amalgamation could work

cold, that is without the input of thermal energy. But by applying heat at differ-

ent moments of the amalgamation process, refiners could speed up the reactions

and thereby increase the cadence of production. Hot amalgamation could

extract silver from its ore in a matter of days whereas cold amalgamation

could take anywhere between six weeks to months. This is effectively what refi-

ners did. Mixes of ground silver ore, mercury, and water were cooked and

re-cooked four or more times in ovens over the span of twelve or more days to

speed up the attraction and binding of silver to mercury.42

Hot amalgamation

was also associated with other heating processes such as the preliminary roasting

of the ore and postamalgamation smelting that removed remaining impurities in

the silver to raise it to mint grade. In sum, the appearance and spread of mercury

brought no savings to the industrys annual fuel wood consumption. And since it

made a broader range of ore grades susceptible to processingmercury could

recover significantly lower concentrations of the metalthe spread of mercury

amalgamation simply allowed overall scale of silver production to grow and

overall levels of fuel wood consumption to grow along with it.

By the eighteenth century, when the Bourbon Monarchy reanimated the pro-

duction and supply of mercury to the mines, the scale of New Spain s silver pro-

duction quickly surpassed the levels obtained in the first mining boom of the

late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.43

In San Luis Potos silver pro-

duction more than doubled to an average level of just under fifty thousand kilos

a year (49,077kg). Since mercury was unlikely to have provided much in the way

of greater fuel efficiency to the foundries of the valley, the felling of trees and

other ligneous matter accelerated at an equivalent rate. We estimate that

311 km2

were cleared per year on average during this period. In certain

bonanza years (1783, 1784, 1793, 1795, and 1796), enough wood had to be

found to smelt over ninety thousand kilos of silver ore, almost twice the

period average. By the 1770s the scarcity of wood had driven prices up to the

point that mine owners at the Cerro de San Pedro no longer could afford to

build the necessary shorings for the mine tunnels.44

In time the carboneros based in and around the valley of San Luis Potos came

up against carboneros who supplied new mines opening up in Charcas,

Guadalcazar, Sierra de Pinos, and Real de Catorce. As in San Luis Potos, fuel

rushes in these new mining centers exhausted local forests and compelled them





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to extend theirown lines of supply in the surrounding high valleys and mountains.

Along with Guanjuato and Zacatecas, San Luis Potos formed the heartland of the

New Spanish mining industry. These sister cities were not so far away and because

they processed even larger quantities of silver, their wood sheds overlapped,

forcing their respective carboneros to compete for the same resources.

EFFECTS ON LOCAL LANDSCAPES AND HUMANCOMMUNITIES

THE PACE, SCALE, AND EXTENT of mining-driven deforestation in New Spain

were remarkable. These changes radically reconfigured both the biophysical

(ecosystems, soil composition, hydrology) and human characteristics of the

colonial Mexican mining belt. The discovery of precious metals and the fuel

rushes that these spawned played a central part in the larger processes of fron-

tier expansion in colonial Mexico. This is well entrenched within the historio-

graphy. However, studies of frontier expansion have traditionally dwelt upon

campaigns of pacification and missionary conversion, neglecting to explore

the possible links between environmental change and the history of the

zones aboriginal communities.45

We argue that the massive transformation

of ecologies and land use patterns wrought by mining inevitably had an

impact on the lives of aboriginal groups. It undercut the material basis of

their subsistence and thus rendered them more susceptible to their incorpor-

ation or removal by Spanish colonial society. By scouring the landscape of

trees, mining set the stage for the development of colonial forms of land-use,

especially the spread of agriculture and pastoralism, and the establishment

of a new colonial society of indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and Iberian settlers.

Across the New Spanish mining belt, trees and shrubs played a fundamental

role in the organization of local ecologies. Shrub oaks, oaks, willows, poplars,

and mesquites acted as classic keystone species. Their presence, by-products,

and actions produced a remarkable degree of biodiversity and vitality in a

region facing important climatological constraints such as low water inputs,

high amounts of solar radiation, and high day-time temperatures. For the

sake of illustration we can take the case of the mesquite, the privileged wood

of the carboneros because of its high thermal output when compared to other

available species and the ease with which it transformed into charcoal.

Mesquites formed groves and stands in valleys and riverine zones. Their

remarkably long rootssome twenty meters on average with some record-

breaking observations of eighty(!) meterspenetrated deeply through the

ground to reach the water table and assure their sustenance through the long

dry season of the area.46

A leguminous species, mesquites acted as important

nitrogen pumps, drawing up nitrates from the bedrock and soil, locking it in

their leaves and then scattering them as litter across the surrounding

ground. Each hectare of mesquite-dominated vegetation produced an estimated





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three hundred kilograms of ammonium nitrate per year, which fertilized the

local soil and was spread during rain bursts across the surrounding alluvial

fans.47

The pods and seeds of the tree were also an important source of proteins,

carbohydrates, and sugars for local animals. Finally, mesquite groves produced

shadea simple yet priceless contribution to plant and animal life, one that

moderated the high daytime temperatures and greatly reduced wind- and sun-

driven rates of evaporation.48 The net effect was that mesquite forests were

zones of remarkable biodiversitycontemporary biologists have counted some

fifteen mammal and ninety-five bird species harboring in a single mesquite

standas well as important agents of soil fertilization well beyond their

immediate vicinity.49

Oaks, pines, willows, and poplars that also composed the areas forests each

made their own contributions to enabling and enriching life in the semiarid

mountains and plains of New Spain. Taken as a group, the trees of the zone

played a pivotal role in creating the conditions for biomass production and bio-

logical diversity in a semiarid region. They did so in a number of ways. Trees

were critical agents of soil building, a process that unfolded over centuries

and millennia. They sustained its fertility through nitrate and carbon fixing.

The latticework of their roots helped anchor this soil in place, an important con-

sideration given the predominantly sloped topography of the zone. Leaf cano-

pies also helped slow soil erosion by dissipating the intense water strike of

the torrential downpours that accounted for a large part of the precipitation

in this climate. And finally, trees both directlythrough the action of their

rootsand indirectlyby providing the propitious habitat for burrowing worms

and insectsdiverted surface water flows into the subsoil. This not only slowed

soil erosion, it also made forested zones important reservoirs of sub-soil water

that could be tapped during the extended dry season. Contemporary studies

show that vegetated areas in semiarid environments hold water for 150 to 225

days longer than bare soil patches.50

Fertile soil, water, shade and wind

coverthese elements combined to help other plant and animal species thrive

and the rich ecology of the semi-arid forests to come into being.

The forests of the Mexican mining belt also helped humans thrive. Prior to the

arrival of the Spaniards in the 1580s and 1590s, the valley of San Luis Potos and

its surrounding highlands was populated by the Guachichile nation, a member of

the Chichimecan confederation described by Fray Guillermo Santa Maria.51

Like

other aboriginal groups of the region, the Guachichiles predominantly lived from

hunting, fishing, and gathering, though there are indications that they also prac-

ticed a low-intensity cultivation of maize in and around fertile and watered

pockets of alluvial land.52

They had a fearsome reputation as master bowmen

amongst the Spanish and indigenous settlers moving in from the south. While

these skills allowed small bands of Guachichiles and other Chichimecans to

slow and temporarily stop the northern advance of the colonial frontier, it is

worth remembering that they were honed by the daily necessity of bringing in

game. The forested sierras and plains of the Gran Tunal were well stocked in





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wildlife and animal protein occupied a central part of the Guachichile diet.53

They sustain themselves by means of the hunt, wrote Santa Maria, Every

day they go forth to track and chase deer, birds, and other game which they

nail with their arrows; they dont even forgive the rats.54

From infancy,

Guachichile boys were armed with bows and encouraged to roam around their

encampments picking off hares, birds, and other small game.55

In addition to game, the Guachichiles gathered from a wide range of plants.

The sixteenth-century natural historian Francisco Hernandez put it that they,

lived from the fruits born spontaneously of wild trees (arboles sylvestres).56

Like other colonial writers, Hernndez was no doubt placing them in a primal

state of nature, but there was more than a little substance behind his rhetoric.

Other observers and archeologists have also noted the importance of seeds,

fruits, and roots in the Guachichile-Chichimecan diet. From the more arid

plains they gathered fruit from the prickly pear cactus and the juice of the

agave to ferment into pulque. From the monte they gathered the seeds and

pods of the mesquite tree. The pods of the mesquite ripen twice a year and

are quite abundant, with botanists counting five thousand of more pods per

tree.57

The mesocarp of the pods is quite sweet, releasing a sugary juice upon

chewing. The seeds are, however, the main source of nourishment. Once

toasted and ground they produced a flour that could be stored until it was

ready to be eaten in the form of atole or tortillas. Mesquite flour continued

to be the staff of life for the Seri people of Sonora well into the twentieth

century. Two women working with a man supplying them with pods produced

forty kilos of flour a day. A final detail to note about mesquite flour is that

while pods could be harvested twice a year and stored, there were other

sources of this legume available to gatherers: the well-stocked caches of

rodents that could be raided when supplies were low or when on the move.58

While no historical account directly describes the Guachichiles gathering

and eating acorns from the abundant oak stands of the areaaside from

Hernndez rather open-ended reference to fruit springing from the treesit is

plausible that they did so. Elsewhere in his treatise, Hernndez mentioned

that acorn-consumption was widespread in New Spain.59

In the Relacion

geografica for the mines of Temascaltepec (near the mines of Taxco in the

central Sierra Madre Occidental) the recorders noted that acorns were ground

into flour and then made into tamales and tortillas.60

In general, acorns and

mesquite pods as well as game were at the core of hunter-gather diets across

Mesoamerica and North America.61

Mota y Escobar mentions the consumption

of game and mesquite flour at different points along his tour of the mining

towns and settlements of neighboring New Galicia.62

Indigenous peasant com-

munities in central and southern Mexico relied heavily on these as supplemen-

tal food sources to cultivated crops and livestock.

The matter of food supply is an important one because it played a central

role in the extension of Spanish colonial society into the homelands of hunter-

gatherer groups like the Guachichiles. They, along with other Chichimecan





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nations, had held the Spanish to central Mexico for decades. Then, beginning in

the 1580s in the area around Zacatecas, the Chichimecans progressively gave

ground and Spanish frontier advanced northwards in earnest over the next

four decades. The key to Spanish success was food. After decades of fruitless

military engagements against an enemy that did not engage in set battles,

melted into the terrain and was a fearsome marksman, the Spanish switched

to a policy of paz por compra (peace by purchase). The basic thrust of the

new strategy was to engage the Chichimecans diplomatically, gifting them

with maize and other foodstuffs in exchange for peace and, more momentously,

for settlement and Christianization in newly established missions.63

Tremendous resources were expended on this efforthundreds of thousands

of pesos disbursed on an annual basis.64

Purchasing peace ultimately turned upon the inability of the Chichimecans

to provide themselves with sufficient food from their own initiative. For the

twentieth-century scholar of the frontier Philip Wayne Powell, food scarcity

was an endemic condition for the Chichimecans, but given the archeological,

historical, and ethnological evidence discussed above, we argue that this was

far from the case.65

What we find instead is a suggestive concordance

between the timing of the successful implementation of the Spanish paz por

compra policy and the erosion of the Chichimecan resource base in the form

of mass deforestation. The first groups to be pacified in this way were the

Zacatecos, Caxcanes, and Tecuexes living in and around the mining city of

Zacatecas.66

They were followed by the Guachichiles, who were settled with

maize and oxen in the valley of San Luis Potos beginning in the mid-1590s

and in the surrounding territories over the subsequent decades.67 Then came

the Pames (another semi-nomadic group, not ethno-linguistically part of the

Chichimecans) in the second half of the seventeenth century. The overall

image is of an extending ring of colonized territory, a ring whose growth

paralleled that of the ring of deforestation reconstituted above.68

Certainly, hunter-gathering groups throughout the New Spanish mining belt

provided resistance to incorporation throughout the colonial period. Just as

food was at the heart of the Spanish policies of frontier expansion, it is interesting

to find that trees were central to indigenous campaigns against incoming settlers.

Carboneroscutting and smoldering in the sierras many leagues away from the

mining settlement; guiding their carts and mules to and from the smelterswere

particularly vulnerable to strikes by indigenous war parties. Confrontations

between carboneros and natives in the outlying highlands around San Luis

Potos or Santa Eulalia, Durango were a regular part of life during the seventeenth

century.69

In the Real de Todos Santos, Chihuahua, the mines were abandoned not

because of lack of ore or lack of consumable biomass but because the Spanish

crown was incapable of protecting the carboneros who supplied the smelters.

This was incidentally, the only recorded case in New Spain that Robert C. West

found of a mining center shutting down for lack of fuel wood.70





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A COLONIAL AGROECOLOGY

TREES AND FORESTS WERE thus at the center of a conflict between two human

ecologies. The autochthonous one was characterized by low density and mobile

occupation of the territory, and tightly entwined with the forests of central and

northern Mexico. As mineral deposits were discovered and exploited across thisterritory, a colonial agroecology of pastures and fields emerged, one that sustained

a growing network of relatively dense urban populations of mining villages, towns,

and cities. Mining contributed to the implantation of this new configuration of

land-use and sociocultural organization in two broadly defined stages.

The first was deforestation and the consequent destruction of the existing

human ecology developed by communities indigenous to the mining zones.

Spearheading this transformation were the carboneros. This was a socially

and ethnically diverse group whose composition captures the complex and var-

iegated nature of the incipient colonial society. At one end of the spectrum werethe owners of large estateshaciendas carbonerascapable of furnishing thou-

sands of sacos (a standard load of ca. seventy kilos of charcoal) to the different

foundries of the area on a regular basis.71 The carboneras benefitted from large

grants of monte secured through royal authority, each ranging in the hundreds

and occasionally thousands of hectares in area.72

Their workforce was broken up

into cuadrillas (gangs) of between twelve and fifteen laborers, who might be

either indigenous and mestizo debt peons or African, Afro-Mexican, and indi-

genous slaves.73

At the other end of this spectrum were numerous small-scale

carboneros who produced charcoal as part of diversified domestic economytypical of New Spains peasantry. They were Iberian, mestizo, and indigenous

migrants, moving into the mining settlements opening up across the highlands

and the north. They grew crops and raised livestock on small plots that were

located within or beside the monte. Charcoal-making provided an important

source of external revenue for the family. Perhaps the most fascinating group

within this band of small-scale charcoal-makers were the indigenous commu-

nities who made charcoal-making into a collective enterprise. In the valley of

San Luis, two of the indigenous parishes dedicated themselves to this office:

the Tlaxcalan community of Mexquitic, located on slopes of the Sierra de SanMiguel on the western edge of the valley, and the Tarascans settled in the

parish of San Miguel at the valleys center. The members of these communities

appear as Yndios Carboneros in the records of the smelters. They arrived on an

almost daily basis, women and men, singly or in pairs, each bearing a load of

charcoal on their back though occasionally they would drive in upon an oxen-

drawn cart bearing between twenty-five to thirty sacks. Collectively, they sup-

plied large amounts of charcoal: thousands of sacks per year, small streams

of charcoal running from the burning pits to the foundries.74

Mining subsequently helped the development of agriculture and pastoral-

ism around the mining centers by providing an important consumption

market for the goods furnished by local producers. Cash earned from charcoal-





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making helped prime this pump. By turning wood into saleable charcoal,

peasants and estate owners alike had struck upon an important means of

generating cash while grubbing up forestland and transforming it into pastu-

rage or field. Estate owners brought in herds of cattle and sheep, hired or pur-

chased workers and built up the infrastructure needed to house people and store

and process the products of their land.75 Indigenous communities primarily

devoted themselves to growing crops of maize and maguey, but the liquidity

gained from charcoaling also allowed them to create the canals and dams

needed to irrigate their fields.76

Both peasant and elite agriculturalists sold

their goods to the mines: foodstuffs, alcohol, and a range of consumable pro-

ducts such as leather, tallow, and wool.

Finally, the creation of a colonial agroecology around the mining centers of

New Spain fed back into the dynamics of mining-driven deforestation. The

extension of fields and pasturages around the mines and smelters blocked

the processes of natural afforestation. Thus when Mexican silver production

accelerated in the eighteenth century, carboneros could not return to the

areas cut down in previous centuries. Unlike England where coppicing and

land management practices allowed charcoal-makers to rotate through the

areas surrounding the smelters, in Mexico expanding agriculture forced

charcoal-making into virgin stands further and further away. Colonial

Mexican metal smelters were not infrequently sourced with timber cut over

one hundred kilometers away while English charcoalers generally ranged no

further than eight kilometers from the furnaces.77

CONCLUSION

SCHOLARS HAVE LONG RECOGNIZED the central place mining occupied in

the creation of colonial society in Spanish and Portuguese America.

Mining structured labor systems, including mass corves, slavery, and incipient

wage labor. It fuelled settlement and urbanization. It was an important, though

not unique, motive for the cultural and sociolegal transformation of indigenous

peoples into Indio subjects of the Crowns of Portugal and Spain. Mining in

sum, was a key agent in the early modern transformation of the societies we

now know as Latin America. This study of silver mining in New Spain

extends our view of minings transformative power to the landscapes of the

early Americas and, by extension, to our understanding of how colonial land-

scape changes redefined existing human ecologies.

Mining, through the consumption of fuel wood, impacted an enormous

swath of the colonial Mexican territory. Close to four hundred thousand

square kilometers were cleared of wood to fuel the colonial mining industry,

something on the order of 20 percent of the surface area of contemporary

Mexico. To put this into perspective, Warren Dean estimated that the

Brazilian gold rush in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries led

to the deforestation of four thousand square kilometersthat is a hundredth





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part of the New Spanish total. Iron works in early modern England contributed

to the almost complete deforestation of the island by the late eighteenth

century, but here too the affected surface area was but a fraction of what was

lost in New Spain.

Mining drove deforestation in New Spain in a number of related ways. The

growth of the early modern world economy during this period guaranteed a con-

sistently high demand for the metal and acted as a constant underlying factor

in the expansion of the colonial Mexican silver industry. Processing silver was

also highly heat-dependent, and thus energy-intensive. Readers may be sur-

prised to learn that the rate of energy consumption per ton of silver ore pro-

cessed by the colonial silver industry was three orders of magnitude greater

than subsequent twentieth century operations or the mega-industrial open-pit

mines of the present.78

This combination of the colonial silver industrys

high per-unit energy intensity and global increase spelled the end for many

of Mexicos forests. Further driving the geographic extension of deforestation

was the associated development of agriculture and pastoralism. The spread of

fields and pastures in the areas surrounding the mines of New Spain foreclosed

on the full regeneration of forests. This pushed charcoal-makers further and

further away from the smelters in search of virgin stands of trees.

Deforestation and the associated development of a colonial agroecology pro-

foundly transformed existing ecologies and the human communities that inter-

acted with them. Insofar as the ecologies of mining-affected territories were

concerned, the shock produced by mining varied in intensity and duration. In

certain zonessuch as Pachuca, Hidalgo, in central Mexicothe change was

cyclical in that sufficient soil fertility and vegetative cover was maintained to

assure a degree of resiliency to the local ecology. This allowed afforestation

to begin in the early twentieth century once mining came to a close or alterna-

tive sources of energycoal and electricityarrived to power the smelting

process. In other zones, however, mining-led deforestation pushed landscapes

past the threshold where recovery was even possible, at least not in the time

frames afforded to human history. The problem was heavy soil erosion triggered

by fuel wood scouring followed by overintensive grazing by cattle, then sheep,

then goats. In the valley of San Luis Potos these new zones of dry scrub and

microfilia included much of the northern edges of the valley, the flanks of

the Sierra de San Miguelito, as well as the highlands around the Cerro de

San Pedro and Monte de Caldera. Similar transitions to desertification occurred

around Parral, Real de Catorce, and Ixmiquilpan.

As the forests of the New Spanish mining belt disappeared, so too did many

of the communities that depended upon them. They did not disappear only in a

physical sensethough many thousands died from war and disease. Bands of

the many peoples of highland and northern MexicoGuachichiles, Tecuanes,

Tepehuanes, Pames, Raramuri, and otherswere settled on missions, converted,

and set to work in the fields and mines. They were pacified, as the Spanish put

it, and molded into a new class of subjected and sedentarized Indians. Across





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the mining belt of New Spain, the combination of deforestation, agricultural

extension, and the development of colonial society marked the end of native

peoples and life-ways.

APPENDIX

ESTIMATING THE RATIO OF SILVER PRODUCTIONTO CLEARED FOREST AREAS, A DISCUSSIONOF METHODS AND SOURCES

GOOD DATA EXISTS for silver production in Mexico for the sixteenth, seven-

teenth, and eighteenth centuries. This was recorded by the Cajas Reales and

used by Richard Garner to calculate the historical evolution of the New

Spanish silver industry. Garner also compiled detailed accounts for each Caja

and worked out silver-weight equivalents from the tithing records. We are tre-

mendously thankful to Garner for sharing his data and his findings with us

since it provides the quantitative spine of this paper. The original series was

printed in John J. TePaske, Herbert S. Klein et al. The Royal Treasuries of the

Spanish Empire in America. 4 vols. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982,

1990). The data is available on Garners website: https://home.comcast.net/~

richardgarner 05/cajafiles.html.

The account books of two Haciendas de Beneficiothe Hacienda of Miguel de

Maldonado in San Luis Potos (for the years 1611-1612) and the Hacienda Nuestra

Seora del Carmen in Pachuca (for the years 1782-1783) contain foundry records

detailing the amount of charcoal consumed in the course of producing silver: the

accounts of the Hacienda de Nuestra Seora del Carmen appear in Cuentas

Generales de Mina de Lomo de toro y Anexas, 1782-1783, Archivo historico de la

Compania de Real del Monte y Pachuca, Coleccin Romero de Terreros, 2o

Conde, Cuentas, Sobre 5, Ficha 2; and the accounts of the Hacienda

Maldonado, Libro de cuentas de la hazienda de Miguel Maldonado, 1611-1612.

AMSLP, leg. 1612 (3), exp. 20. Despite the separation in time and geography

between these two haciendas, the charcoal to silver ratios were strikingly

similar: an average of 1,185 kilograms of charcoal per kilogram of silver produced

between 1611 and 1612 at the Hacienda Maldonado; and an average of 1,168 kilo-

grams of charcoal per kilogram produced between 1782 and 1783 at the Hacienda

Nuestra Seora del Carmen. Our calculations assume, given the consistency in

the charcoal to silver ratios recorded in Pachuca for and San Luis Potos, that

the cut area to silver production ratio remained roughly constant over the

course of the colonial period and that the rate of forest clearing accordingly

rose in a linear fashion with the growth of the mining sector. This assumption

might be invalidated, confirmed, or nuanced with future research.





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Studies of contemporary charcoal use and biomass cover in Arizona and

Sonora and on site observations around the valley of San Luis Potos were

then combined to estimate the surface areas affected for each unit of silver pro-

duced. The relevant ratios here are: (a) the amount of cubic meters of firewood

used to produce a kilogram of charcoal (0.0132m3:1 kg) from Matthew J. Taylor,

Biomass in the Borderlands: Charcoal and Firewood Production in Sonoran

Ejidos, Journal of the Southwest 48 (Spring 2006): 76; and (b) the average

surface area covered by each cubic meter of firewood (409.89m2

of pine-oak

and oak forests per 1 m3

of fuel wood) from Conrad J. Bahre and Charles

F. Hutchinson, The Impact of Historic Fuel wood Cutting on the Semidesert

Woodlands of Southeastern Arizona, Journal of Forest History 29(1985): 180

and from field observations taken from plots at Monte Caldera and the Sierra

de Alvarez in the state of San Luis Potos in February and July, 2007. When

these different ratios are brought together a serviceable estimate emerges of

how much woodland was cleared for every kilogram of silver produced: 1kg of

silver produced= 1168.01 kgs of charcoal consumed= 15.45 m3

wood

volume= 6332.8 m2

of felled forestland.

NOTES

The authors would like to thank Dr. Richard Garner for generously sharing his

data on colonial Mexican silver production, Dr. Juan Carlos Ruiz Guadalajaraand Dr. Flor Salazar for help and advice on the research on San Luis Potos,

and the two anonymous readers for their thorough and conscientious review

of the original draft. Funding for this project came from the Social Sciences

and Humanities Council of Canada.

1. Informe de Antonio de Mendoza a Luis de Velasco, n.d., in Coleccin de documentos

ineditos para la historia de Espaa, vol. 26, ed. Martn Fernndez de Navarrete

(1842-1895; reprint, Vaduz, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1965), 288. See discussion in

Robert C. West, Early Silver Mining in New Spain, 1531-1555, in In Quest of

Mineral Wealth: Aboriginal and Colonial Mining and Metallurgy in SpanishAmerica, ed. Alan K. Craig and Robert C. West (Baton Rouge: Geoscience

Publications, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State

University, 1994), 124-25.

2. Cited in Chantal Cramaussel, Sociedad colonial y depredacin ecolgica: Parral en

el siglo XVII, in Estudios sobre historia y ambiente en Amrica I: Argentina, Bolivia,

Mexco, Paraguay, ed. Bernardo Garca Martnez and Alba Gonzlez Jcome (Mxico

DF.: Colegio de MxicoInstituto Panamericano de Geografia e Historia, 1999), 98.

3. For Ixmiquilpan, see Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental

Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press,

1994), 11; Peter Gerhard, Guide to Histori

environmental history 2010 studnicki gizbert 94 119

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