Sabine Hyland
Address: School of Divinity
University of St. Andrews
St Marys College, South Street
St. Andrews, Scotland
KY16 9JU
University of St. Andrews
St Marys College, South Street
St. Andrews, Scotland
KY16 9JU
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Papers by Sabine Hyland
This chapter examines anomalies in a khipu radiocarbon dated
to the Late Horizon (475+-26 cal BP), focusing on a specific
type of anomalous knot, referred to as a “nether knot”, which
occurs below the unit position on a khipu pendant in a zone
where, according to Locke’s knot typology, no knot should be
present. Nether knots, which are found on one or more pen-
dants in over 20% of the khipus in the Online Khipu Repos-
itory, the world’s largest khipu database, form a significant
feature of the khipu corpus. This article proposes a reading of
nether knots based on ethnographic analogy with nether knots
on 20th century khipus. A better understanding of nether knots
allows us to provide more precise readings for the khipus that
contain them, necessitating a revision to Leland Locke’s influ-
ential knot typology.
presented as evidence that khipus could constitute an intelligible
writing system, accessible to decipherment. Recent scholars
have asserted that khipus were merely memory aides, recording
only numbers, despite Spanish witnesses who claimed
that Inka era (1400–1532 CE) khipus encoded narratives and
were sent as letters. In 2015, I examined two khipus preserved
by village authorities in Peru. Villagers state that these sacred
khipus are narrative epistles about warfare. Analysis reveals that
the khipus contain 95 different symbols, a quantity within the
range of logosyllabic writing and notably more symbols than in
regional accounting khipus. A shared, mutually comprehensive
communication system of such complexity presupposes a writing
system, possibly logosyllabic. At the end of each khipu epistle,
cord sequences of distinct colors, animal fibers, and ply direction
appear to represent lineage (“ayllu”) names.
This chapter examines anomalies in a khipu radiocarbon dated
to the Late Horizon (475+-26 cal BP), focusing on a specific
type of anomalous knot, referred to as a “nether knot”, which
occurs below the unit position on a khipu pendant in a zone
where, according to Locke’s knot typology, no knot should be
present. Nether knots, which are found on one or more pen-
dants in over 20% of the khipus in the Online Khipu Repos-
itory, the world’s largest khipu database, form a significant
feature of the khipu corpus. This article proposes a reading of
nether knots based on ethnographic analogy with nether knots
on 20th century khipus. A better understanding of nether knots
allows us to provide more precise readings for the khipus that
contain them, necessitating a revision to Leland Locke’s influ-
ential knot typology.
presented as evidence that khipus could constitute an intelligible
writing system, accessible to decipherment. Recent scholars
have asserted that khipus were merely memory aides, recording
only numbers, despite Spanish witnesses who claimed
that Inka era (1400–1532 CE) khipus encoded narratives and
were sent as letters. In 2015, I examined two khipus preserved
by village authorities in Peru. Villagers state that these sacred
khipus are narrative epistles about warfare. Analysis reveals that
the khipus contain 95 different symbols, a quantity within the
range of logosyllabic writing and notably more symbols than in
regional accounting khipus. A shared, mutually comprehensive
communication system of such complexity presupposes a writing
system, possibly logosyllabic. At the end of each khipu epistle,
cord sequences of distinct colors, animal fibers, and ply direction
appear to represent lineage (“ayllu”) names.
Four centuries later, this Incan chronicler had been all but forgotten until an Italian anthropologist discovered some startling documents in a private collection in Naples. The documents claimed -- among other things -- that Valera's death had been faked by the Jesuits; that he returned secretly to Peru; and that he penned the famous chronicle attributed to Guaman Poma. Far from settling anything, the documents created an international sensation among scholars and led to a bitter dispute over how they should be assessed. The Italian scholar who first revealed them received death threats for her role in publishing them. In the Jesuit and the Incas, Hyland takes a balanced approach between the two bitter sides of the debate. She argues that the first set of manuscripts found are "true lies" -- colonial forgeries in Valera's name, created by his secret followers. She does not comment , however, on the later 'Naples documents', which had not been brought to light when the book was written.
Drawing on a remarkable collection of documents found in archives in the Americas and Europe, including a rare cache of Albadán’s candid family letters, Hyland reveals what life was like for the Chankas under this corrupt and brutal priest, and how his actions sparked the instability that would characterize Chanka political and social history for the next 123 years. Through this tale, she vividly portrays the colonial church and state of Peru, as well as the history of Chanka ethnicity, the nature of Spanish colonialism, and the changing nature of Chanka politics and kinship from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.
“Based on an amazing wealth of documentation gleaned from archives and private collections on three continents, this marvelous microhistory brings to life the world of the Andean villagers of Pampachiri as they fall under the ruthless exploitation of a sadistic priest. Beginning with a series of events in this small village during the late sixteenth century, Sabine Hyland weaves a vivid story of the foundations and persistence of Chanka ethnicity, the role of the church and its clergy, and the nature of Spanish colonialism. In so doing, she provides a more balanced evaluation of the construction of a new social order.”
—Noble David Cook, Florida International University
“In this gripping, excitingly narrated history, Sabine Hyland tells the story of a Spanish priest who for a decade abused and bedeviled his parishioners—the Chankas of the village of Pampachiri, in the high Andes of southern Peru. From her extensive research in archives in Spain and Peru, Hyland breathes life into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents, producing a remarkable story of priestly depravity met by the staunch resistance of Andean villagers. This is a groundbreaking microhistory of the highest order, deeply informing our understanding of people and events in a remote corner of the colonial Andean world.”
—Gary Urton, Harvard University
“A masterful example of how to narrate and analyze at the same time. Sabine Hyland tells a tale that centers on a larger-than-life villain (as all good stories do), reveals a village of victims who struggle against him, and builds to a mysterious denouement—while reconstructing a past society and exploring its complex development over centuries. The result makes for grim and gripping reading.”
—Matthew Restall, Pennsylvania State University
“Four hundred years ago, the psychopathic curate Juan Bautista de Albadán afflicted a whole Quechua town with sexual and financial abuse. Do colonial situations give psychopathy special scope and power? In finding Albadán’s family letters, Hyland opens a new perspective on trauma and survival among early modern communities.”
—Frank Salomon, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 65, no. 4, Winter, 2012.
Karin A. Vélez
Macalester College
Sabine Hyland’s concise, paperback English translation of a 1594 Peruvian manuscript is the ideal supplement and counterpoint to university courses on colonial history of the Americas or early modern religion. Part of the Latin American Originals series by Pennsylvania State University Press, the heart of this book is a fifty-page selection of a primary source, An Account of the Ancient Customs of the Natives of Peru, introduced by three succinct and well-researched chapters of background analysis. Hyland has deftly translated this anonymous unpublished Spanish manuscript. She has chosen to leave Latin, Quechua, and Aymara terms interspersed, giving special attention to the Quechua terms, which are defined in the text and compiled in a glossary. Hyland also makes a persuasive case for attributing this piece’s authorship to the controversial sixteenth-century mestizo Jesuit Blas Valera, though she relegates much of the fascinating details of determining provenance to an appendix (105–09). In addition to its Jesuit authorship, the work is significant because it presents unique information and opinions about the Inca religion soon after the Spanish conquest. The Account ends with a passionate diatribe against Spanish tactics used to convert native Andeans to Christianity. It therefore stands to complicate the better-known and frequently assigned primary-source writings about colonial Andean religion, such as works by Jesuits José de Acosta (Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 1590) and Bernabe Cobo (History of the Inca Empire, 1653), both more conciliatory about missionary methods; and works that are more critical, by non-missionary Inca descendants such as Garcilaso de la Vega (Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, 1617) and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (The First New Chronicle and Good Government, 1615). This slim volume is thus positioned to handily prove the wide diversity of religious views held in sixteenth-century Peru, among the Jesuits as well as among Andean converts.
Chapter 1, “Native Gods and Missionaries,” tackles the Jesuit author’s agenda. Blas Valera was a devout Catholic, though he had to reconcile this religious identity with his mixed heritage as son of an Inca mother and a Spanish conquistador. Hyland notes that this makes his work read as “part ethnography, part apologetics” (4), as he tries to present the Andean religion as a worthy precursor to Christianity. This position causes him to deny the Inca practice of human sacrifice, and to contradict his Jesuit superior José de Acosta (5–6). Hyland puts Valera in the company of other Jesuits who advocated for inculturation, such as Matteo Ricci (11), but she emphasizes that Valera’s work emerged at a formative moment of harsh censure within the Jesuit ranks that resulted in voices like Acosta’s winning the day (19).
Chapter 2, “Blas Valera: His Life and ‘Crimes,’” addresses the “mysterious crime” (22) that led to Valera’s incarceration for heresy. She emphasizes that he was the “first mestizo Jesuit . . . in South America” (21), with his multilingual background garnering him postings to prominent Jesuit initiatives among the Andeans such as the missions of Huarochiri and Santiago del Cercado. His race and experience among the newly converted contributed to his forming radical views. Hyland downplays the political subset of Valera’s arguments, such as his questioning of Spain’s legal rights to the Inca Empire (30). Instead, she contends that what got Valera into trouble were his views on using indigenous languages to evangelize. Echoing the tone and heterodoxy of Valera, Hyland writes wistfully of a fleeting moment in the Andes when “the mountainsides [had] been filled by hermits known as huancaquilli and by nuns called acllas, all vowed to tito [chastity] and huñicuy [obedience]” (32). Her argument about the risky mixing of terms gains substance in chapter 3, “Sources,” when she shows that, unlike other chroniclers, Valera procured much of his information about Andean religion from khipus, the knotted-string texts of the Incas (35). This was in spite of colonial restrictions that had driven the use of khipus underground (42–43).
Valera’s manuscript seems anticlimactic after such preamble, though three sections stand out for length and intensity. One is “Diviners” (68–73), where Valera gives attention to fascinating minor daily rituals predating Christianity, including throwing grass while confessing. Another is a section on “Acllas” (79–87), or consecrated virgins, which discusses the respected role, training and selection of these women. A last is “Conversion of the Peruvian Indians to the Catholic faith” (88–103), where Valera is at his most condemnatory and specific about the mistakes of early missionaries. While Hyland does make brief mention of personal rituals, gender, and political protest in her opening chapters, after reading Valera’s manuscript one wishes for more explanation of these unusual flashpoints. It seems that for Hyland it was enough, however, to simply put forward this castigated Spanish Jesuit to remind us “that there also existed pro-Indian voices . . . at the dawn of Euro-American history” (14).
Reviewed by Thomas Whigham, Professor of History, University of Georgia.
In Ethnohistory, 56:2, Spring 2009; pp. 349 – 351.
The term “conquest”, as applied to the early Spanish experience in the New World, suggests a precipitous event in which native empires yielded to European interlopers after a sharp, decisive struggle. In fact, the elaboration of a new colonial regime in the Americas took many years to accomplish, and because it was erected upon the ruins of complex Indian civilizations – with their own histories and traditions – it necessarily proved incomplete and artificial. Many elements of the old order regularly percolated through from the bottom rungs of society. These filled the conquered peoples with a sense of identity that, if it was not loudly proclaimed, nonetheless always asserted itself. The colonial masters, for their part, felt safe in the assumption that history is written by the winners; they thus felt comfortable in dispensing with all native superstitions, stories and accounts of past heroes. Such blather, they felt was retrograde and childlike at best, sacrilegious at worst, and in any case worthy only of suppression. Because the Spaniards took this duty seriously, the Indian “voice” usually speaks to us from the past only in highly modified form, except in a very few cases.
This, just perhaps, is one of them. In the early 1640s, the Spanish priest Fernando de Montesinos assembled the five-volume Memorias antiguas i nuevas del Pirú, a magisterial study of all the things that he had seen and learned while on a fifteen-year sojourn in the Andean provinces. The work was encyclopedic. It included extensive information on Peruvian flora and fauna, the region’s mineral wealth, and the history of Pizarro’s victory over the Inca Atahuallpa a century before. Montesinos had hoped that when the manuscript was published, its Spanish readers would respond enthusiastically to his intricate descriptions of a curious land and particularly to his principal thesis: that Peru bore an uncanny, and perhaps not coincidental, resemblance to the Old Testament Ophir. Unfortunately for the priest, he found no patron to finance the publication of his work, which, after his death in 1653, made its way unnoticed into the extensive collections of the Real Academia in Madrid. There it lingered unmolested and unnoticed until the nineteenth century, when scholars who were looking for other materials chanced upon it by accident.
Ironically for Montesinos, his entire work has yet to be published even today. His contention about a “Spanish Ophir” never found any support from modern Andeanists, who tend to find his anti-Indian diatribes both distasteful and ill-informed. Yet, Book 2 of the work nonetheless excited considerable interest. No wonder – it contained a remarkable set of Incan myths and histories that were known from no other account. Because these stories contradicted the standard Cuzco-based version of Incan origins, they tended to be rejected by many historians, who pointed out the sloppiness and imprecision in Montesinos’s text, which was derived from an earlier anonymous chronicler associated with the diocese of Quito.
As Sabine Hyland points out in this new edition, the “Quito Manuscript” deserves to be taken seriously. Textually, it seems quite distinct from the other four volumes, which are marked by a turgid, overly-polished prose, obviously of Montesinos’s own authorship. This work, by contrast, has a more regular style, set within a unified poetical structure, similar in tone to Biblical genealogies. Its author, almost certainly, was an Indian whose original language was Quechua, for certain terms and syntactical structures make this case strongly.
The Quito Manuscript is striking on several levels. It contains an extensive pre-Incaic king list that covers many centuries of political authority in Peru before the advent of Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo. No matter that some of the personages it mentions are clearly mythic, the work merits attention as an indigenous response to Spanish colonialism in the years just after the conquest. Its author rejects the slander that the early kings were morally corrupt idolaters and portrays them instead as thoughtful and just rulers, honorable predecessors of the Incas, who themselves acted with greater decency and wisdom than the Spaniards. These early peoples had a writing system all their own, he insists, and this fact (questionable though it may be) placed them on par with modern Christians.
The Quito Manuscript is also noteworthy for its frank discussion of sexual themes – homoeroticism, pederasty, and the “love magic” that women used to turn the men of an earlier epoch away from their bestial inclinations. These topics clearly show how the interpretation of the anonymous author reflected Christian teachings, but they are not entirely overwhelmed by them. One can sense the Andean realities – the pride – just beneath the surface.
Hyland intends that we accord the Quito Manuscript a just portion of recognition. That seems an easy enough assignment, but I would likewise wish to praise the specific role she played in the process. Not only has she saved for posterity an important source on early Peru, she has effected its rescue with all the deftness of a Sherlock Holmes. She has carefully examined the various early editions, and discovered exactly where error or bowdlerization crept into them. She has made similar examinations of the extant manuscript versions. Perhaps most interesting of all, she has pondered the question of exactly who wrote the book and how it must have fallen into Montesinos’s hands in the first place. As a piece of bibliographic research, this is a very impressive study, hard to put down.
This is the story of Father Blas Valera, the child of a native Incan woman and Spanish father, caught between the ancient world of the Incas and the conquistadors of Spain. Valera, a Jesuit in sixteenth-century Peru, believed in what to his superiors was heresy: that the Incan culture, religion, and language were equal to their Christian counterparts.
As punishment for this treachery he was imprisoned, beaten, and, finally, exiled to Spain, where he died an untimely death at the hands of English pirates in 1597.
Four centuries later, this Incan chronicler had been all but forgotten, until an Italian anthropologist discovered some startling documents in a private Neapolitan collection. The documents claimed, among other things, that Valera's death had been faked by the Jesuits; that he had returned to Peru; and, intriguingly, while there had taught his followers that the Incas used a secret phonetic quipu—a record-keeping device of the Incas—to record history.
Far from settling anything, the documents created an international sensation among scholars and led to bitter disputes over how they should be assessed. Are they forgeries, authentic documents, or something in between? If genuine, they will radically reform our view of Inca culture and Valera. The author insightfully examines the evidence, showing how fact and fiction intertwine, and brings the dimly understood history of this author-priest to light.
". . . a wonderfully written study that takes the reader into the early colonial world where an Andeanised Christianity was a plausible alternative to idol-smashing ethnocide, and where it was still possible to imagine other outcomes for Peruvian society. The rise and fall of mestizo Valera's work and the tragic arc of his life humanise otherwise dry Tridentine debates over how much authorship Andeans would be granted over the religion they would publicly practice in the colonial world. . . . Hyland is to be thanked for giving us this beautifully written and moving history. A must for specialists, it is also suitable for advanced undergraduate classes."
—Itinerario
"Sixteenth-century mestizo Jesuit Blas Valera has long remained an elusive figure in colonial Andean history, but Sabine Hyland's new study of this fascinating man changes that. Her book uncovers the key events in Valera's life and spells out his ideas on native Peruvian history, religion, and language. As a result, Valera rises from the shadows and becomes a significant player in the debates on the historical conception of the Incas and evangelization strategies for the indigenous population in the sixteenth century. . . . Thanks to Sabine Hyland's book, many readers will find a new window through which to view the history of colonial Peru."
—CLAHR: Colonial Latin American Historical Review
". .. . Hyland provides insight into the life of the Jesuit scholar, indigenous historian, teacher, and religious comparativist. Part history, part detective novel, the book plunges into various controversies: Christianity and indigenous Inca religion; Jesuits and the Spanish Crown; Valera's own mixed heritage; and even Valera and the Jesuits who imprisoned and then exiled him, despite his loyalty to the order. . . . Valera takes his place among ethnographers such as Acosta and Native rights advocates such as Las Casas, and Hyland's book provides captivating access to his unique contribution to history. Highly Recommended."
—Choice
"This is a beautifully written, deeply informed and highly informative work. . . . [Hyland] has cast a bright light into a corner of early colonial Latin American scholarship that we had all but abandoned hope of ever seeing into very clearly."
—Gary Urton, Harvard University
"[A] refreshingly lucid account of an important but poorly known figure in colonial Latin American history."
—Richard L. Burger, Yale University
". . . a 'must-read' by all serious scholars of native Andean history."
—Catholic Historical Review