History of a Periphery

Juliet B. Wiersema is an associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the author of Architectural Vessels of the Moche: Ceramic Diagrams of Sacred Space in Ancient Peru.

Wiersema’s book is a remarkable study of the long-overlooked narratives that these select manuscript maps and their documentation provide...[with] impressive interdisciplinary scope. (caa.reviews) The book brings alive a borderland...[and] paves the road for new studies that consider in more detail Indigenous and African peoples’ political projects, and how they shaped these contested landscapes. (HAHR) Wiersema does a great job distinguishing the functions of printed maps (which served imperial interests) and manuscript maps (which reveal complicated local stories with diverse actors seeking control and access to its resources). (H-Net) [The History of a Periphery] sheds new light on the significance of peripheral places within the larger framework of the Spanish Empire...Wiersema's study of little-known manuscript maps is one of the book's most important contributions...By situating each map within its historical and legal context, Wiersema reveals the human stories behind the geography...[and] how manuscript maps, while advancing colonial ambitions, inadvertently preserved aspects of Indigenous identity. (Journal of Historical Geography) The History of a Periphery offers a carefully crafted analysis of four little-known eighteenth-century manuscript maps of various areas in the Pacific Lowlands region of the Viceroyalty of New Granada...This slim book is both scholarly and, at the same time, a joy to read. (Terrae Incognitae) Wiersema has created a brief, well-researched monograph on an area of the world that, to this day, is not well-known or well mapped. (Western Association of Map Libraries) This [is a] well-researched and elegantly produced volume...While providing enormous insight into ChocÓ in the eighteenth- century, Wiersema has also made a strong case that professional cartographers can no longer ignore the insights found in manuscript maps...The product of seven years of scholarly research, The History of a Periphery is an outstanding accomplishment. (Journal of Global South Studies) The precision of details that illustrate concrete historical situations or point out seemingly insignificant details, such as the course of a river, the boundary of two parcels of land, or the influx of canoes at a river mouth, are a kind of data that allow us to interpret social, economic, political, and environmental facts that, at first glance, seem not to be intertwined. This is the principal strength of the book. (The Americas)

• Acknowledgments Abbreviations Glossary Introduction 1. New Granada: A Categorically Different Viceroyalty 2. Coming into View: The Pacific Lowlands in Manuscript Maps 3. The Map of the Atrato River and Pueblos of Cuna Indians: The Atrato VigÍa and the Short-Lived Cuna ReducciÓn of Murindo, 1759–1778 4. The Map of the ChocÓ, Panama, and Cupica: The Unrealized Potential of a Pacific Port, 1777–1808 5. The Map of the Dagua River Region: Las Juntas, Sombrerillo, and African Agency in the Pacific Lowlands, 1739–1786 6. The Map of the YurumanguÍ Indians: The “Discovery” and Decimation of the Pacific Lowlands’ Indigenous Inhabitants, 1742–1780 Conclusions: What Manuscript Maps Contribute to the Study of Colonial Latin America Appendix A: Transcribed Text from Manuscript Map Legends Appendix B: Technical Study of the Manuscript Map of Dagua River Region, Colombia Notes References Index