Descendants of Aztec pictography: the cultural enyclopedias of sixteenth-century Mexico

course of the Amazon. The volume relies on a modern readership’s fascination with the particular, the tangible, and the intimate, but it uses the allure of the material world to draw the reader into a world of knowledge: the expertise, material skill, and understanding of persons born or living in the ‘New World,’ be they creole, Nahua, or Inca—of cartography, mummification techniques, the crafting of quipus, the care of insects, or metallurgy. As such, the volume is not just a material history of the New World but, perhaps even more importantly, an important testimony to decades of vibrant historiography on Iberian (American) art, science, and knowledge, once viewed as ‘marginal,’ and peripheral to modern science (that historiographical context, incidentally, one might have liked to learn more about in the introduction). Indeed, the volume is the product of a scholarly network, stretching from London to Quito, and from Madrid to Rio de Janeiro, linking some of the most prominent institutions and figures in the history of Iberian (American) science and knowledge in the present day, and as such essential reading for any student looking for a colorful, graphic, and readable introduction to the subcontinent’s epistemic and material history. For, it is precisely in its cabinet-like breadth and disparateness that the volume manages to capture the extent, sophistication, and contingency of knowledge production about the material world in colonial Latin America.