Indigenous Technologies in the 1577 Relaciones geográficas of New Spain: Collective Land Memory, Natural Resources, and Herbal Medicine

This essay applies the analytic category of technologies proposed by historian Marcy Norton as complex systems of knowledges, practices, and products generated in specific social contexts to a study of the sixteenth-century bureaucratic surveys known as the Relaciones geograficas (RG) manuscripts. As a methodological intervention, the principal aim is to draw out the relatively understudied Indigenous knowledges and practices found throughout the corpus. The first section of the essay outlines the conceptual framework of technologies and contextualizes the RG survey and response processes. The remainder of the essay discusses Indigenous technologies including collective land memory, natural resources, and herbal medicines recorded in the Archdiocese of Mexico corpus of RGs (appendix), thirty-one manuscripts in total.