Many colonial textual genres written either in Spanish or in native languages by indigenous authors within the Mesoamerican cultural area share three features that distinguish them as a group, when compared to other writings by native subjects in Asia, Africa, or other regions of the Americas. These texts often reference an "immemorial" past with distinct sociopolitical rights and traditions wh...

We present unambiguous records of preindustrial atmospheric mercury (Hg) pollution, derived from lake-sediment cores collected near Huancavelica, Peru, the largest Hg deposit in the New World. Intensive Hg mining first began ca. 1400 BC, predating the emergence of complex Andean societies, and signifying that the region served as a locus for early Hg extraction. The earliest mining targeted cin...

Based on the analysis of the mitochondrial control region and seven biallelic markers of the Y chromosome, we investigated the genetic composition of two rural populations of southern Santiago del Estero, Argentina, that were seats in colonial times of pueblos de indios, a colonial practice that consisted of concentrating the indigenous populations in organized and accessible settlements, to fa...

We examine how historical experiences with modern medicine affect present day engagement with the health sector by examining the legacy of French colonial medical campaigns. Between 1921 and 1958, the French military organized medical campaigns to treat and prevent sleeping sickness. The military forced villagers to participate and used medications with harsh, sometimes fatal, side effects. We ...

This article explores the scientific and entrepreneurial incentives for malaria research in the tea plantations of north Bengal in colonial India. In the process it highlights how the logic of 'location' emerged as the central trope through which medical experts, as well as colonial administrators and planters, defined malaria research in the region. The paper argues that the 'local' emerged as...

The purpose of this study was to determine the role of colonial morphology of Burkholderia cepacia complex (BCC) organisms in pathogenicity in a mouse model of pulmonary infection. BCC strain C1394 was rapidly cleared by leukopenic mice after intranasal challenge, whereas a spontaneous variant (C1394mp2) that was indistinguishable from the parent strain by genetic typing persisted in the lungs ...

In the sixteenth century, Spanish missionaries judged and ranked human intelligence and civilization by whether the people were in possession of alphabetic writing. This was an initial moment in the configuration of the colonial difference and the building of the Atlantic imaginary, which will become the imaginary of the modern/colonial world. Translation was the special tool to absorb the colo...

Paul Fox closes his exploration of the institutionalisation of memory within museums with the question “do Australians inhabit a postcolonial world or a landscape of colonial memories?” [Fox, 1992, 317] The question forms for him out of an analysis of the ways in which the orderings of aboriginality and space of the colonial museum continued to haunt Australian cultural imaginaries in the early...