Conopa

A conopa is small, usually a few inches, and carved from a stone soft enough to work easily, often with banding or veining that the carver uses. The commonest form is a camelid, a llama or an alpaca, rendered compactly with the legs folded under and the head raised. Others take the shape of maize cobs, of other crops, or of forms less easy to identify.

The defining feature is the hollow. A depression is cut into the back of the figure, and it is there to hold an offering. That single detail settles what kind of object this is: not an image to be looked at, but a thing to be fed, which puts the conopa in the same family as the Mongolian ongon at the other end of the world and for reasons that have nothing to do with contact.

What a conopa concerns is increase. A camelid conopa is held for the growth and health of a herd; a maize one for a crop. It belongs to a household, is inherited within it, and is not communal property and not the business of a shrine. Because Andean herding families own their animals individually while much else is held collectively, that domestic ownership is exactly right for what the object is about.

Size is part of the definition. These are objects that fit in a hand and can be moved, hidden or carried between houses, which mattered a great deal once officials began looking for them.

The seventeenth-century campaigns against Andean religion in the archdiocese of Lima produced some of the most detailed documentation of any indigenous American religion, and they produced it for a reason no historian can be comfortable with. Officials went from settlement to settlement and house to house, questioning people, recording what they found, and destroying it. Conopas were a priority target, because they were domestic, portable, easy to conceal and present in nearly every household.

The resulting archive lists objects, names owners, records what the objects were said to do, and then records their destruction. It is a rich source and a hostile one, and everything in it was obtained under conditions that make its use as evidence genuinely difficult: people described their own practice to men who were going to punish them for it, and they had every reason to minimise, misdirect or say what was wanted.

The campaigns also failed at what they were for. Carved stones of the same kind, serving the same purpose for the same herds, are in use in the southern Andes today, kept by families and fed as they always were. That continuity is not a rediscovery or a revival. The extirpation was thorough, well documented and, in the end, not effective, and the small stone animals outlasted the archive that catalogued them.