The socio-environmental impact of mining in a peripheral Andean region, 1776–1831

Abstract From an environmental-historical perspective, this article seeks to contribute to the characterization of mining and metallurgy developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the Argentine Cuyo region (Mendoza, San Juan and San Luis). It also seeks to examine the role they played in the region’s socio-historical dynamics, particularly in terms of the appropriation of available natural resources and the strategies employed in mining labours. The relationship among economic activities and the environmental configuration of the Cuyo territory and the social agents that lived there is analysed through four case studies that allow for greater understanding of the central role of sociopolitical causes in the definition of environmental transformations.