Introduction
The essays between these covers represent the best thinking of 15 numismatic scholars from Europe and the Americas on topics ranging in time from the sixteenth century to the present and bounded geographically only by the ample confines the Viceroyalty of El Perú at its greatest extent. The initial versions of these articles were presented to some 70 registrants at the fifth Conference on Coinage of the Americas (COAC) sponsored by the American Numismatic Society in its West Hall on October 29 and 30, 1988. Well before the conference took place I was besieged by writers and callers eager to know when the published version of these talks would be available. And with good reason. When Freeman Craig, our first speaker, asserted that the meeting was an unprecedented gathering of experts on early South American numismatics I was highly gratified; now that I have read and reread the papers as an editor I am convinced he spoke no more than the truth.
A collection like this is by nature multifaceted, yet the attentive reader will have no difficulty in discerning the main lines of development for Spain's colonial South American issues at the least. We can be especially thankful to Freeman Craig for accepting the thankless but necessary task of providing an overview of the entire colonial series and explaining the economic and political background of the kaleidoscopic variation in the metallic finenesses, weight, design, and technology utilized by the several mints over these two and a half centuries.
Historically, of course, the silver "cob" coinage of Spain's New World colonies vastly outweighed the gold issues in quantity, value, and economic importance. Yet the gold coins have an undeniably romantic lure for collectors and the general public alike—in part perhaps because coins in the nobler metal were struck with greater care and artistry and because they hold up to immersion in seawater as sunken treasure so much better. Thus I was pleased indeed when Frank Sedwick agreed to discuss the gold cobs of Lima for COAC. After a distinguished career as a university professor of Spanish language and literature, he is now a leading dealer in cobs and author of the engagingly written guide titled The Practical Book of Cobs. In these Proceedings he shares his expertise on the beautiful Lima mint gold cobs, communicates the excitement involved in collecting them, and offers many a seasoned veteran's tip on attribution, value, and sources.
Gold was the main precious metal coined by Spanish mints in Nuevo Reino de Granada (Colombia), but Joseph Lasser devotes his attention here to the scarce and sporadic silver coins issued there. This colonial series has often been a numismatist's nightmare because of sparce documentation and design variation that, as Lasser says, could easily be taken as merely whimsical in origin. When nonexistent quality control in the striking process is added to the picture, one often has riddles hidden in enigmas wrapped in mystery. There can be no doubt that Lasser has substantially dispelled the confusion that formerly prevailed about colonial Colombia's early silver issues, from the beginning (1622) to 1748, just before the mint's "deprivatization" by the Crown in 1751. Any future study of the subject will have to take the lists of assayers and illustrations of coin types—for the Cartagena as well as the Bogota mint—provided here as its point of departure.
In establishing the distinction between coins minted at these two mints, Lasser makes convincing use of the Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) method for "fingerprinting" silver objects. Adon Gordus (a chemist) end Jeanne Gordus (a historian) are a husband and-wife team at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, that has pioneered in the development of NAA over the last 20 years. Their contribution to COAC 1988 and its Proceedings reexamines an age-old paradigm using the latest techniques of science. Contemporary observers compared Spain's gold and silver wealth from the New World to rain falling on a rooftop—not remaining there but running off to both sides and thus enriching Spain's neighbors, not Spain itself. Earl Hamilton's scholarly elaboration of this metaphor in 1934 attempted to show that Spain's economy had actually declined due to this massive influx of bullion, and that the same cause was largely responsible for Europe's catastrophic hyperinflation in the seventeenth century. What the Drs. Gordus ask is, if the Hamilton thesis is correct, why isn't more of the enormous Potosí output— identifiable through NAA—found in the contemporary coinage of nations that should logically have been inundated by it through transfer payments? In a word, Where has all the silver gone?
Some have argued that the Gordus method, for various reasons, is an unsound technique of metallurgical analysis. Yet the authors take account of many objections that might be raised; what is more, the articles by Lasser, Stallard, and Lill seem to demonstrate the trustworthiness of NAA as applied to coinage. It is the special virtue of scientific research that apparent setbacks often lead to more fruitful ways of posing questions or attempting to answer them. So whether the Hamilton thesis (in its monetarist formulation, at least) is further discredited, or Potosí silver in something like the expected quantities is discovered in alternative form in Europe or even as coinage farther afield than has been considered up to now, important new economic and historical insights will be the result. Even should NAA prove an inadequate technique for this kind of problem solving, the outcome should be new impetus for investigation of the past with the most modern of tools.
Nearly a third of the COAC contributors undertook investigations into the earliest years of coinage in the Viceroyalty, and it is in this field that I believe the Proceedings will continue to be must reading—often even the definitive authority—for years to come. Whatever their linguistic capacities, students of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish American numismatics have often found themselves handicapped by the tendency of classic authors like J.T. Medina and Francisco de Garcia Pelaez to cite their primary sources incompletely or not at all. Sometimes documents that were cited in the classics could not to be found by later archival researchers. One result of such shortcomings was the habitual but unsatisfactory practice of citing secondary sources as though they were primary ("Medina reports," e.g.). It is a refreshing change to have in Eduardo Dargent-Chamot's article an almost day-by-day account, in English and clearly referenced to contemporary documents in the Archivo General de Indias, of South America's earliest mint operation. The author has found documents indicating that Lima's case de moneda began operations some six months later than generally believed, and he is able to show conclusively that the first Lima 8 reales, produced in 1568 and 1569, were neither patterns nor counterfeits, as many have thought. Dargent revises another accepted truth by showing that the last coins minted under the assayer Diego de la Torre were struck as late as 1592. Finally, like K.A. Dym and A. Cunietti-Ferrando elsewhere in this book, Dargent identifies assayer X with Xines Martinez (1570-72), whose tenure coincided with the transition to the crowned shield pattern.
K.A. Dym's publications in Spanish, like those of Dargent and Cunietti, have been instrumental in bringing about a new consensus among numismatists as to the sequence and chronology of the first mint assayers at Lima, La Plata, and Potosí. Here that pathbreaking work is made available for the first time in English, together with an illustrated catalog of the type coins produced at the several mints and vouched for by the various assayers. There seems no reason to doubt that Ernesto Sellschopp's attribution of coins with assayer initial C to La Plata has now been definitively refuted, with the R of Alonso Rincón (the first assayer at Lima, it will be remembered) accepted as the only La Plata assayer as well as the first for Potosí. The ignis fatuus of discriminating between the coins of La Plata's ephemeral mint and that of Potosí need no longer crease numismatic brows. Moreover, Dym's article dispels the confusion that formerly prevailed (even in the early colonial period itself) between town and mint assayers, thereby casting new light on what actually took place as Spaniards set about exploiting the mineral riches of El Perú.
Arnaldo Cunietti-Ferrando's contribution makes extensive use of vital colonial documents available so far only in the several archives he has explored. It provides—for the first time in English—a synthesis of his research and that of Dym, Dargent, and earlier, "classic," authors like Sellschopp, Dasi, Burxio, Medina, and Vignale. For example, this extensive account allows us to follow in detail the human interactions evoked by Viceroy Toledo's decision to close the La Plata mint and move its equipment to Potosí in spite of vigorous opposition by the audiencias of Lima and Charcas and the cabildo of Santa Fe. To cite only one more of many services rendered by Cunietti in this article, he has located the testimony given in the investigation ("provansa") of 1575 carried out in Potosí at Toledo's behest. This document, as Cunietti remarks, represents one of the most important sources available anywhere for Potosí's early mint history; parts of it were cited by J.T. Medina early in this century, but it was believed lost until our author found it in the Archive of the Indies at Seville. (This provansa, like dozens of other transcripts of legal cases, appeals, and the like, would be invaluable if published in an anthology of otherwise inaccessable documents important for numismatists and others researching this era.) In sum, Cunietti's treatment, including his catalog and chronology of Potosí assayers at its conclusion, is destined to remain the starting point for any future numismatic study of this mint's early history.
Barry Stallard's in-depth analysis of the mysterious "AP" coins is an admirable assault on a tough problem that, when COAC 1988 met, had not been addressed since Sellschopp's 1974 article in the Gaceta Numismatica. Stallard brings together the best corpus of these coins to date, complete with schematic renderings of design devices that are sometimes extremely difficult to make out with coin in hand, let alone in a photograph. His attribution of these specimens to a period before 1585, possibly at the La Plata mint, is ingenious in its analysis of the data available to him, including neutron activation analysis carried out by Professor Gordus. Certainly his rebuttal of Sellshopp's argument that the coins are spurious is a telling one: no "unofficial mint" then or now could have an interest in striking coins of the correct weight and fineness and calling attention to itself by utilizing a mint mark so unlike the official issues. The greatest weakness of Stallard's hypothesis, as he acknowledges, is the lack of any written evidence—in Spain or the New World— to indicate that the colloquial Alto ("Highland") Peru was used as an official place-name ("C" for Charcas would have been a more likely way to identify a site in the area). Meanwhile, Sewell Menzel's article in the June 1989 issue of Gaceta Numismatica ("La misteriosa case de moneda colonial en Panama") has reproduced Philip It's royal ordinance establishing a (short-lived) mint in the capital of El Perú's third audiencia. Nevertheless Stallard's work will always be valuable (as it was to Menzel) for its keen analysis and description of the AP coins themselves.
Another numismatic enigma—the source of "Large Crown" countermarks on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century 2-real coins of the Peruvian mints—has been definitively resolved in the contribution by Robert Leonard presented in this volume. Leonard's work represents a diligent piece of numismatic sleuthing that began with the hypothesis that the coins were overstruck at Potosí. Helpful tips from contemporary numismatists led the author to Burxio, who led him to Medina, who led him to Garcia Pelaez's mid-nineteenth century history of Guatemala. That book in turn sent Leonard ad fortes: the seventeenth-century Guatemalan chronicles in the original, archaic Spanish of Ximenez, Molina, and Cano. Along the way the author assembled a formidable, exhaustively documented corpus of these elusive pieces, published here for the first time together. The story of how the 2 reales—and not other Peruvian denominations of this era—came to be marked as they did, and the explanation Leonard gives for their scarcity, make fascinating reading.
The last of our articles devoted to the colonial period is Glenn Murray's "Mechanization of the Peruvian Mints." Murray's research in the Archive of the Indies has unearthed a wealth of written sources, technical sketches, and architectural plans, supplemented by his own photographs of surviving seventeenth-century mint machinery from Potosí, Lima, and Segovia. He tells how Potosí came to have a new mint to accommodate the equipment needed if modern "milled" silver coinage was at last to replace the traditional cob issues. Nearly half a century elapsed between the first royal initiative and the final shutdown of cob production—a period punctuated by inefficiency, obstructionism, conspiracy, and even by earthquake. A period that lends new poignancy to the famous response "Obedesco pero no cumplo" ("I obey but do not carry out") characteristic of colonial officials unable or unwilling to comply with royal orders.
Bolivia—republican Bolivia—is the focus of Richard Doty's lucid discussion of "proclamation coinage," defined here with admirable succinctness and examined in its historical evolution. Doty shows how such "procs" served to bolster regimes with shaky claims to legitimacy and to familiarize the population with claims upon its loyalty. As means of communication were improved, Doty shows, the need for such highly material tokens of political legitimacy diminished—ultimately even in Bolivia, the classic land of nineteenth-century proclamation coinage. These issues represented a possibly essential but inevitably evanescent stage in the evolution of nationhood.
Focusing more narrowly on a subset of Bolivia's proclamation coinage (or "special coinage" as he terms it, based on nineteenth century precedent), George Lill III asks whether the production of at least certain mules, pieforts, and uniface strikes has been as evanescent as one might expect from Doty's article. Are these pieces, in other words, actually counterfeits made sometime during the past 35 years? Lill has utilized the research of Horace Flatt and the NAA methodology of Adon Gordus in conjunction with his own years of study in this area to make a convincing case that the specimens he writes about were in fact produced outside the Potosí mint and at a much later date than is apparent. In conclusion he grapples successfully with the ethical dilemma familiar to those who try to make life difficult for counterfeiters and find that they have inadvertently helped them to make more deceptive fakes.
One of the many legacies of El Perú was the persistence after Independence of patterns of trade and commerce that transcended the artificial boundaries of the new nation-states. This was especially true of the link between southern Peru and Bolivia: as Horace Flatt demonstrates, it took the two states almost 40 years to free themselves from the debased coinage called moneda feble struck in particularly large amounts by Bolivia. The feble, originally intended as a kind of provincial coinage for internal commerce in Bolivia, flowed effortlessly over the borders into Peru, where a chronic shortage of coins encouraged the bad money to drive out the good. A saga of war, diplomatic demarches, and complications in international trade ensued in spite of repeated attempts at reform in both countries. Using a large assortment of primary sources, Flatt has unravelled this complex chain of events, showing how the repeated changes in Peruvian coin standards and designs of this period arose.
Concluding this volume, William Christensen picks up the historical thread where Freeman Craig earlier left off, surveying the coin patterns of Peru down to the recent past. He writes with genuine affection about these "numismatic orphans," an affection the reader comes to share. Drawing on decades of familiarity with the series, he puts them in historical, technological, and artistic perspective. Everyone at all familiar with the evolution of Peru's coinage will find something to edify or delight him in this elegaic exploration of the paths not taken.
During the preparations for COAC 1988 and the production of these Proceedings, many scholars helped me with information and advice, notably Kurt Dym, Frank Sedwick, and Bill Christensen. Frank Deak, the ANS photographer, made hundreds of beautiful color slides for the lectures and most of the black-and-white photographs for this book. My gratitude is immense to all the authors represented here—indeed to all who spoke, exhibited, or simply constituted the sympathetic audience at the conference. From the very beginning the Organizing Committee ensured success by identifying potential speakers, convincing them to participate, and generally spreading their enthusiasm far and wide. I am particularly grateful to Howard Herz for arranging the translation of Arnaldo Cunietti-Ferrando's paper, to Freeman Craig for his infinite patience with my plodding initiation into the mysteries of colonial Spanish numismatics, to Leslie Elam for his cheerful help at every stage of the project. I took advantage of Richard Doty's knowledgeable and freely given advice more times than was fair. Finally, Joseph Lasser acted as speaker, exhibitor, sponsor, and writer with that generosity and commitment many of us know and prize so highly.