Historians of mining in colonial Latin America are faced with a deep and persistent
methodological tension in our field. From census records, surveys, and tribute tallies, we
know that indigenous men and women represented the majority of miners and refiners in the
silver centers of Potos� and Zacatecas, but because they left little written evidence of their
work, their intellectual and technical contributions remain underappreciated in the
historiography. By tracing terms that European translators of �lvaro Alonso Barba's _Arte de�…