Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala

The nueva corónica is not a history in the European sense but a petition with a history attached, and it is addressed to one reader. Guamán Poma set out to show Philip III that the Andes had had lawful government before the Spanish arrived, that Andean nobility was real nobility, that Christianity was welcome and Spanish colonial administration was not, and that the remedy was to restore Andean lords to authority under the Crown. To make that case he had to establish the Andean past as ordered and legible, so the first part of the manuscript runs through ages of the world, the Inca rulers and their queens, the officials of the state, the ritual calendar month by month, the punishments and the roads. The second part is an indictment.

Priests who keep concubines and run weaving shops, corregidores who extort, the mine draft at Huancavelica and Potosí, the taking of Andean women, the collapse of the population. He wrote in Spanish that a Spanish reader would have found rough, threaded with Quechua and Aymara, and he wrote it over decades. Then he sent it, and it did not arrive, or arrived and was set aside. It was found in the Royal Library at Copenhagen in 1908 by the German scholar Richard Pietschmann. How it got there is unknown.

The 398 drawings are the reason the manuscript is used the way it is. They are pen and ink, full page, captioned, and they show things no text in the corpus describes: how a mummy bundle was carried, how a khipu was held, what a diviner did with a fire, the posture of a person addressing a huaca, the tools of a mine, the layout of a village church.

Historians of Andean religion who cannot recover a gesture from a Spanish paraphrase can sometimes see it here. The drawings also carry an argument of their own. Andean figures are shown with dignity and correct insignia, Spanish figures are frequently shown behaving badly, and the placement of figures on the page follows an Andean spatial logic that scholars have argued encodes rank and moiety. Reading them is not straightforward.

Guamán Poma had absorbed European print conventions and was drawing partly in that vocabulary, so a European sign and an Andean one can sit in the same image. He also had reason to present what he presents. But a picture made by an Andean hand in about 1615, of Andean practice, by someone who had watched extirpators work, is a category of evidence that scarcely exists anywhere else in colonial South America. Scholars now cite the drawings by folio number in the same way they cite a passage of text, which is a fair measure of the evidentiary standing the images have acquired in the last half century.