New World Nature

Project Title: New World Nature

Description: The Digital Initiatives, Scholarship, and Collaboration (DISC) team recently migrated the website New World Nature to Omeka S, an open-source application for publishing and displaying digital archives. New World Nature, the brainchild of Mackenzie Cooley, Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Latin American Studies Program at Hamilton College, is a repository for relaciones, “geographic and culture questionnaires” which “local administrators of European, mixed, and indigenous origins completed . . . in the late 1570s and 1580s.” Cultivating an in-depth exploration of a “moment of transition as the last of the Nahua elders could shed light on life prior to European colonization,” the archive collects centuries-old maps, minutely-observed biological illustrations, textiles, intricate landscape studies, illuminated manuscripts, and sketches of social and cultural life as it was observed by conquistadors and colonists. Viewers are offered the chance to peer into a vanished world — to imagine the colliding, and consequent remaking, of multiple civilizations. The archive also records “the extent of loss” in the New World under colonial regimes, as Spanish flora, fauna, and culture brutally supplanted native biodiversity and indigenous autonomy. Compare illustrations by indigenous artists to documents representing colonial perspectives in the Vikus Viewer, an interactive timeline, arranged by keyword and time period, which collates the diverse ephemera of the archive. Reappearing keywords include, predictably, European, mammal, and plant — but also armadillo, breadfruit, and Giants of Patagonia (Spanish conquistadors of the time reported seeing massive humanoids throughout the area. One early 17th century sketch depicts a team of excavators excitedly uncovering a huge skeleton.) Communicating the depth and breadth of colonial curiosity and indigenous wisdom, the archive records a history of inquiry into natural science and anthropology fostered by the “discovery” of the New World, as well as the oppression manifested by colonial interests as colonizers undermined and exploited indigenous cultures.

Deliverables: Digital Archive

Date: 2018 - Present