Even before Francisco Pizarro set foot in South America, the people, wealth, natural resources, and social organization of the prehispanic Andes were already being documented in text. The earliest known document of this kind, the Sámano account, was copied into the Spanish royal record by Juan de Sámano around 1528. By recounting the first European explorations in the region, the Sámano account established a tradition of recording and collating information about the Andes in written documents, a practice that continues today in projects like Joanne Pillsbury’s Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, 1530–1900.

In the three volumes of Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, Pillsbury provides an invaluable and innovative resource for researchers interested in early modern global history as viewed through the lens of Andean South America. The Guide, as Pillsbury refers to the majestic multi-volume set, is a summary compilation of manuscript and printed sources. Volume 1 introduces the types of primary sources that are relevant to ancient and early modern Andean studies. It includes essays by twenty-nine contemporary scholars that informatively and critically outline three categories of documents useful to the study of the Andes: colonial administrative documents, church records and evangelical texts, and sources on science and arts. The topics covered in volume 1 have been determined by research done by scholars to date, adding a historiographical dimension to the Guide that succinctly summarizes the state of the field of Andean studies.

The second and third volumes feature 186 descriptive entries of specific primary sources organized alphabetically by the document’s author. Each entry provides a description of the book or document, bibliographic references, biographical and historical context, and practical information, such as its present location, published editions, and translations. Volumes 2 and 3 are the result of an impressive effort to locate published and unpublished sources in their cultural and historical contexts. For example, the anthropologist Blenda Femenías contributes a biography and commentary on the writings of Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, notable for the inclusion of several full-page illustrations from the 1748 edition of their Relación histórica (vol. 2, 326–335). Like other authors featured in the Guide, Juan and Ulloa traveled from Spain to South America in the eighteenth century to gather information on the state of the Spanish Empire for the crown; their findings were published in several editions after their official report was filed with the royal bureaucracy.

The summaries that make up the final two volumes succinctly explain many of the known sources relevant to the study of early modern and modern Andean history. Expanding on a chapter by Martin Lienhard outlining seven different types of texts produced by authors of indigenous descent between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries (vol. 1, 87–103), volumes 2 and 3 include entries on sources by indigenous authors, such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva coronica and the Huarochirí manuscript. However, in a few instances, authors referenced in the contextual essays of volume 1 are not highlighted with individual entries in volumes 2 and 3, such as Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo, described by renowned Bolivian art and architectural historian Teresa Gisbert as “one of the greatest promoters of the arts,” who offers the first documented praise of the ability and promise of Ecuadorian artists in his 1792 text Primicias de la cultura de Quito (vol. 1, 362). Though many of the texts date to the Spanish conquest period, the Guide also draws attention to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources, as well as cultural production.

The Guide departs from earlier Peruvian summaries of sources relevant to the study of Andean history first initiated by Ruben Vargas Ugarte in his Manuel de estudios peruanistas (Lima: Librería Stadium, 1952) and most recently amended by Franklin Pease (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1995). (For Mesoamerican studies, Robert Wauchope edited a similarly extensive project, the Handbook of Middle American Indians, 15 vols., Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964–75.) Unlike its Peruvian predecessors, the Guide is designed for English-speaking scholars and students. Nonetheless, the Guide also celebrates an “indigenous” Andean past which its contents may help to illuminate, a history that itself emerges in the sources described. The Guide gathers information pertinent to the writing of the history of the Andes, much like the earliest comparable example, the Sámano account discussed above. Overall, the Guide successfully demonstrates that the writing of history is a dynamic collective effort that builds on the accumulation of data and analysis over many generations.

As scholars and students in history, anthropology, and art history continue to investigate and write the history of the Andes, the Guide will be of utmost importance to their efforts; however, the specific significance of the Guide to art-historical inquiry will be the focus of the remainder of this review. Gisbert authors a synoptic chapter entitled “Textual Sources for the Study of Art and Architecture” (vol. 1, 353–377), which pays special attention to the sparse number of documents that specifically address the arts. This chapter highlights the fact that the Guide bridges the gap between South American, European, and North American scholars, in particular by integrating historical and contemporary bibliographies from each region. Organized chronologically, Gisbert’s material outlines sources that provide information on art and architecture, exposit aesthetic concepts, and include illustrations of artistic merit. (Other essays in volume 1also intermittently introduce visual resources, among them maps, illustrated chronicles, travel accounts, urban views, and illustrated catechisms.) With a focus on illustrated accounts, she suggests that documents presented in the Guide be used to compare artworks of the past with those that remain today, to identify the circumstances under which artists and patrons collaborated, and to critically analyze the relationship between early modern European and Latin American art. Gisbert emphasizes that the sources presented in the Guide are useful for the study of both ancient and viceregal Andean art.

The inclusion of this chapter by Gisbert raises questions regarding the perception and practice of art-historical research methodologies. Although a special sub-section highlights “Textual sources for the study of art and architecture,” all the sources presented in the three volumes are relevant to studying the socio-cultural circumstances that informed the viewing and production of artworks. The focus on texts in the Guide reiterates the idea that artworks are to be interpreted through the use of documentary evidence; this act of separating works of art from active cultural production characterizes art as a static rather than active component of socio-cultural interactions.

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault identifies the unconscious of scientific categorization: “Unknown to themselves, the naturalists, economists, and grammarians employed the same rules to define the objects proper to their own study, to form their concepts, to build their theories” (New York: Random House, 1970, xi). A question that continued to return to my mind as I read through the Guide was what impact will its ordering of knowledge have on art-historical analysis? Theoretically, Andean studies has the potential to critique and dismantle the dominant European epistemological models currently retained in the humanities, specifically the discipline of art history, as Pillsbury and Lisa Trever have done in the context of archaeological history (Ñawpa Pacha 29, Institute of Andean Studies, 2008). Although the project undertaken in the Guide may seem to dilute that capability by placing arbitrary boundaries around potential inquiry in the scope of its contents, the sources and related bibliography highlighted within the Guide summarily reveal the depth of research materials available to art historians, as in the entry on the little-known Pedro Vicente Cañete y Domínguez (vol. 2, 108–111) that brings to light manuscripts held by the Archivo General de Indias, published viceregal correspondence, and crucial secondary compilations like Gabriel René-Moreno’s 1896 Biblioteca peruana (La Paz: Fundación Humberto Vázquez-Machicado, 1990 (1896)).

Foucault’s oft-quoted passage from a Chinese encyclopedia describing a categorical system for organizing animals (actually taken from Jorge Luis Borges, a South American writer) demonstrates that the possibilities of thought are delimited by the codified systems ordering knowledge. In the past, early modern Andean documentary sources have been organized according to Spanish bureaucratic divisions and modern categories of historical analysis. What volumes 2 and 3 of the Guide demonstrate is that when given the opportunity the historical record can reveal patterns of knowledge from the past, such as the profound integration of “European” and “indigenous” traditions. The study of ancient and early modern Andean artworks has the prospect of creating fresh art-historical methodologies, exploring global modernities from within the context of early modern colonialism. The Guide will certainly prove to be an invaluable resource for scholars who seek to confront the current limitations of our system of thought; it is the task of art historians to build on the work of the impressive array of contributors to the Guide, to take advantage of the doors it opens in order to direct a course toward the production of new knowledge.