Introduction

Thank you for visiting this page!

This website is part of my History Ph.D. dissertation project at the University of Rochester, “Treasure Excavations in the Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic World,” a study of bureaucratic, inquisitorial, and criminal records of licensed and illicit treasure-hunting and grave-robbing in Iberia and colonial Latin America.

Licensed treasure hunting is the rather nefarious premodern precursor to scientific archaeology. The phenomenon originated in Fatimid and Abbasid Egypt before being adopted in medieval Iberia and later exported to colonial Latin America. The earliest licensed excavations in the Hispanic world date to the thirteenth century and appear first around Valencia around the time of the region’s conquest by the Kingdom of Aragon. By the end of the Middle Ages, a robustly bureaucratic system governing excavations of buried treasure had evolved and was soon deployed in colonial Latin America.

The targets of these excavations in Iberia were material heritage spanning the Greek, Carthaginian, Roman, Visigothic, Islamic, and medieval Christian eras, but in the Americas, artifacts found in indigenous North and South American tombs and sacred sites were licitly preyed upon under Spanish law.

This website provides a database of excavation records and a map showcasing the widespread impact of these premodern incursions into the archaeological record.

This project is supported by the Mellon-Meliora Digital and Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship at the University of Rochester.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns.

Thanks!

Jeff

Jeffrey W. Baron

PhD Candidate (History), University of Rochester

jbaron4@ur.rochester.edu