UMass historian Heidi V. Scott has authored a new book, Mining Maps and Enlightenment in the Andes (Brill, 2026), on the relationship between maps, the underground, and colonial thought. Scott, a historian and historical geographer of colonial Latin America, teaches courses on cartography, colonial Latin American history, and environmental history, all of which factor into her newest book. In this book, Scott uses eighteenth century Andean mining maps to reveal colonial understandings of the subterranean and the Spanish American Enlightenment. She examines often overlooked maps from the colonial Andes to tell stories of mining sites in late colonial Bolivia, Peru, Chile, and Ecuador. Through these stories she seeks to answer:
How were [maps] made and used, and what effects did they have? What do these maps reveal about colonial understandings of the subterranean? How might they enrich understandings of the Spanish American Enlightenment?
Mining Maps and Enlightenment in the Andes is Scott’s second book, following her first monograph, Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Notre Dame U.P., 2009). Scott has also published articles in Geoforum, Hispanic American Historical Review, Istor: Revista de Historia Internacional, Journal of Latin American Geography, Cultural Geographies, Journal of Historical Geography, and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Mining Maps and Enlightenment in the Andes is published by leading humanities publisher De Gruyter Brill and is part of two of the press’s series, Brill Research Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences and Brill Research Perspectives in Map History.