Historia del Nuevo Mundo

Bernabe Cobo's Historia del Nuevo Mundo is a primary source, a seventeenth century Jesuit chronicle drawing on Cobo's own decades of residence in Peru and access to earlier now-lost Inca and colonial records, making it one of the most detailed surviving accounts of Inca religion, ritual calendar and cosmology. As firsthand and near-contemporary colonial documentation, it preserves ethnographic and ritual detail found in few other surviving sources. It is also a Jesuit missionary's account, written within a colonial religious framework that classified Inca practice as idolatry to be documented partly for the purpose of its suppression, so its descriptive detail is generally trusted by modern Andeanists while its interpretive framing is read critically against that missionary purpose rather than taken as a neutral outside record.