Of Bricks and Rafters: Granada’s Waste Archives in Perspective

Research Seminar

Date: Dec 15, 2025
Time: 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: María Lumbreras
Location: Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rome
Contact: Editorial-LMG@biblhertz.it

Of Bricks and Rafters: Granada’s Waste Archives in Perspective

At the turn of the 1570s, vast portions of the Albaicín and Alcazaba neighborhoods in Granada underwent a double process of ruination. Houses there first suffered the devastation of two years of armed conflict, during the Alpujarras war––which had started as a Morisco revolt in these very neighborhoods in the winter of 1568. Then, after Philip II forced the exile of most of city’s population of Muslim descent as punishment for the rebellion, through deportations that began in the winter of 1569, most of these houses were abandoned. As walls and roofs began to crumble, the Spanish crown instituted a policy that extended its punitive agenda to the urban fabric: it was established that all residential buildings that had belonged to resettled Moriscos would be left to deteriorate.

This talk looks as the impressive “waste archives” created in the wake of this policy. Extending over several volumes, each hundreds of pages long, this collection of documents records all materials from wasting properties that beginning in 1573 were selected for reuse––slated for resale so that the crown could profit from the rubble. While the volumes offer a unique insight into recycling practices from the period and, ironically, remain our only access to a whole urban patrimony that was lost, these tomes also pose pressing questions about historical perceptions of waste. This is above all because of who authored them: they were commissioned from a select group of Moriscos called “seises” (i.e. former tax collectors of the Morisco tax known as the farda), who had been exempted from deportation precisely because of their strategic expertise in land distribution, property, and the commerce of certain materials.

How, as art historians, should we confront these volumes and the notions of value or refuse they register? How, indeed, do their fair in connecting discard practices with current discussions about architectural heritage and the colonial archive? Are the materials registered in them an index of extrativism or of strategic acts of salvaging? My presentation delves into these questions by reconstructing these records’ context of making, using their pages to retrace the figure of the seise as waste expert. At its center is a concern with the material and symbolic legacies of racialized rubble and with subaltern approaches to making and unmaking “waste.”

María Lumbreras is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the joint histories of ruins and forensic techniques in the early modern Iberian world, looking in particular at the history of antiquarianism and its ties to juridical and environmental practices and conflicts. This is precisely the topic of her first book, on which she is currently at work and which is tentatively titled The Facture of Evidence: Forensic Landscapes and the Past in Early Modern Spain. Lumbreras’ research has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ACLS and the Getty among other institutions.

Scientific Organization: Chiara Capulli

_{Image: Francisco Heylan after a drawing by
Ambrosio de Vico, Plataforma de la Ciudad de Granada, c. 1612 (detail). Copper
engraving. 420 x 620 mm. Museo de la Abadía del Sacromonte.}