The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781-1844 - Hardcover

Hamann, Byron Ellsworth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1606067737 ISBN 13: 9781606067734

Publisher: Getty Research Institute,U.S., 2022

Synopsis

The Invention of the Colonial Americas is an architectural history and media-archaeological study of changing theories and practices of government archives in Enlightenment Spain. It centers on an archive created in Seville for storing Spain's pre-1760 documents about the New World. To fill this new archive, older archives elsewhere in Spain-spaces in which records about American history were stored together with records about European history-were dismembered. The Archive of the Indies thus constructed a scholarly apparatus that made it easier to imagine the history of the Americas as independent from the history of Europe, and vice versa. In this meticulously researched book, Byron Ellsworth Hamann explores how building layouts, systems of storage, and the arrangement of documents were designed to foster the creation of new knowledge. He draws on a rich collection of eighteenth-century architectural plans, descriptions, models, document catalogs, and surviving buildings to present a literal, materially precise account of archives as assemblages of spaces, humans, and data-assemblages that were understood circa 1800 as capable of actively generating scholarly innovation.

About this title

About the Author

Byron Ellsworth Hamann's research is focused on the art and writing of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, as well as on the connections linking the Americas and Europe in the early modern Mediterratlantic world.

Edition details

• Publisher: Getty Research Institute,U.S.
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1606067737
• ISBN 13: 9781606067734
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328