In this talk Juan Carlos Mantilla will be presenting his project Cosmographia Antarctica. It studied how between the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Andean and Mediterranean intellectuals reinvented global cosmography from the equinox southward.

Reading chronicles, maps, and indigenous myths and fables, alongside western cosmographical treatises, the project shows how the early modern fall of the ancient Ptolemaic torrid zone theory gave way to a southern world conceived as both geologically and historically connected. Conquerors such as Pedro Cieza de León and indigenous scholars, like Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti used local observation and indigenous myth to challenge ‘ancient cosmographers’; European humanists reinterpreted biblical geography to relocate Ophir and Eden in Peru; cartographers sketched southern land bridges and imagined Antarctic continents.

By recentring pre-Columbian knowledge practices, and questions that appeared in South American scholarship, the project reframes the cosmography of the antipodes as a transatlantic, multilingual enterprise forged through exploration, philology, and visual invention. It argues that the Andean Americas functioned as a theoretical laboratory where equinox, antipodes, and south pole became tools to narrate planetary time, ancient migrations, and to imagine a truly connected world in the south.