Cattle shaped colonial Spanish America in many ways. Some aspects of this story are well known: the galloping growth of livestock populations, the workings of New Spain's livestock guild modeled on Spain's Mesta, conflicts between ranchers and villagers, the economic and cultural importance of meat and leather. This book sheds new light by analyzing cattle bones excavated at Puerto Real (now in Haiti), Mexico City, Mérida, and Antigua. The bones from Puerto Real have been closely analyzed before, but most of the others have not. Dating from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, the sites allow Nicolas Delsol to make some interesting comparisons across space and time. Some findings corroborate existing interpretations: the age at which animals were slaughtered confirms the general prevalence of open-range ranching (what agronomists would later call extensive stock raising), the distribution and types of bones suggest that colonial elites generally paid for and got...

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