“Bitumen-Bound: Morisco Ecologies at the End of Spain’s Islam”
María Lumbreras, Assistant Professor of Art History at UC Santa Barbara
Friday, February 6 at 11:30AM PST
Register for the Zoom link here:
https://uci.zoom.us/meeting/register/2GjRQZ8kSH2jNbFII6RW3g
“In the parts where the bitumen coating did not reach the edge of the roundels, or where it chipped away, it seems as if the lead underneath has turned into soil.” The goldsmith Juan de Mozo’s testimony on the Sacromonte Lead Books, the collection of forged Arabic-inscribed tablets that griped Granada and most of Catholic Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century, is actually one of dozens across the Sacromonte inquest file (proceso de las reliquias del Sacromonte) that emphasizes the importance of bitumen. Initiated in 1595, the Sacromonte inquiry was Granada’s first formal investigation into ancient Christian remains. It provoked controversy after controversy given the city’s Islamic heritage, at times pushing papal Rome to its limits. Yet in the course of its four years, the inquiry transformed the period’s understanding of forensics and, with it, public life in the southern Spanish city. Indeed, half a millennium later, scholars are still struggling to make sense of its vast records, including the complex knot of environmental questions––about soils, aridity, landscape ruination, and the nature of ancestral public lands––that I take up in this talk. From the fall of 1595 to the inquiry’s de facto conclusion in the summer of 1598, Morisco craftsmen behind the forgeries’ manufacture fueled these questions by lacing the plomos, as Mozo noted, with ever more sophisticated applications of hardened tar. My presentation focuses on these bitumen coatings, which are rarely treated as their own archive, building on a growing field of scholarship that braids historical geography, material culture, and environmental and legal histories. By placing these coatings in the longer history of the Valparaíso Hill where the falsifications were originally planted, and which the bitumen conceptualizes as the relics’ original habitat, it is possible, I argue, to recuperate the range of Morisco insurgent critiques channeled into the plomos’ making––what I call “Morisco ecologies.”