The Spanish empire controlled the majority of the Western Hemisphere’s lands and peoples for more than three centuries. Its vast administration in the Americas depended on the work of royal notaries, Indigenous artists, and printers, who produced prodigious amounts of written and printed documents. Despite the extensive documentation, present-day understanding of the Spanish colonial enterprise is fragmentary due to the archive’s intellectual inaccessibility: Scholars and interested audiences must decipher archaic penmanship, obscure writing conventions, and unfamiliar Indigenous imagery to read these historical sources—a task that requires trained eyes. This project seeks to use artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to automatically convert this “unreadable” archive into accessible data.