La minería en el Nuevo Mundo by Carlos Prieto (review)

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 607 English Medieval Graffiti. By V. Pritchard. New York: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1967. Pp. viii-f-196; illustrations. $12.50. Apart from a report of H. F. Wilson in 1887 and articles by G. G. Coulton (1915) and R. C. Hine (1920), little has been done to record the many casual inscriptions which were scratched in the Middle Ages in England on pillars, walls, or other surfaces of churches, castles, and the like. Mrs. Pritchard’s book is an admirable attempt to cover at least one area in a systematic way, providing some 230 illustrations, mostly from rubbings, of graffiti in some ten counties of southeastern England. As the illustrations well show, the graffiti “are far from mere scratchings performed by unskilled hands”; at times, indeed, the lettering is as good and as incisive as that in many manuscripts of the period, while some of the drawings (e.g., that of St. Paul’s, London, in the well-known Ashwell graffiti) are executed with skill, if not with imagination. Many of the villages in which the graffiti are found were very remote; yet much of the work was done by hands trained in draftsmanship and the use of tools. Possibly the local parish priest had a hand in some of the drawings, but a case could be made for a wider distribution of craftsmen than has hitherto been suspected. Not all graffiti, of course, prove to be as socially significant as, shall we say, those at Pompeii, but nevertheless they can as a whole yield inter­ esting data for historians and others. Thus the present collection includes illustrations of a cart, a cloak, dice, bells, harps, swastikas, chalices, crosses, as well as ships (especially figs. 132, 157, 158, 165), shoes, tunics, hats, female headdress, flowers, deer, dragons, birds, and a windmill (n. 175); there are also a large number of geometrical designs, interlaced and leaf patterns, and, surprisingly, several examples of musical notation as a decorative motif (figs. 61, 87, 185, 187, 188). Swastika peltae occur with regularity (see pp. 32-37, 177—80), and Mrs. Pritchard provides a useful map (p. 177) of their distribution. Leonard E. Boyle* La minería en el Nuevo Mundo. By Carlos Prieto. Madrid: Ediciones de la Revista de Occidente, 1969. Pp. 194; illustrations. Pts. 150. Carlos Prieto is an exiled Spanish industrialist residing in Mexico, an amateur historian, and, in the present tome, an apologist for the Spanish Empire in America. The work is not a history of mining but rather an overview of the colonial epoch of Spanish America in which the mining enterprise serves as a touchstone for social and economic development in general. This is not an original work, and some chapters, indeed, are scarcely more than a pastiche of comments drawn from the works of other historians. Prieto’s thesis is that the thirst for gold and silver and the subsequent exploitation of mineral resources by the Spaniards lent characteristic * Dr. Boyle is professor of palaeography and diplomatics at the Pontifical In­ stitute of Medieval Studies, Toronto. 608 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE form and direction to the entire colonial enterprise. Mining is seen as the “forge” of Spanish America, the motive force behind colonial urbaniza­ tion and the prime determinant of the communications network. Prieto rectifies the traditional view that mining was an impediment to agricul­ tural exploitation, by pointing out that profits made from mining were often invested in agriculture and stockbreeding. In each case, the Mexi­ can and Andean experiences are discussed together, a synthesis which is the book’s most useful element. The sections on metallurgy and mining technology add nothing new but are based on solid monographs and therefore provide a useful introduction to the subject. Thomas F. Glick* The Craftsmen of Tula: Pioneer Builders of Water-driven Machinery. By A. S. Britkin. Translated from Russian. Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations (for the Smithsonian Institution and the National Science Foundation), 1967. Pp. 41. The armories and arsenals of 17th- and 18th-century monarchies were the nurseries of what was to become the modern machine tool and modern standardized interchangeable parts, for it was there that metal­ working

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