Guaman Poma’s account of Andean cosmological ages and the dead

Record summary

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno combines history, social criticism, Christian interpretation, Indigenous visual conventions, and accounts of Andean time, origins, rulers, ritual, and death. Its descriptions and drawings of earlier ages and sacred order can support research on how underworld, ancestor, and boundary concepts were reformulated under colonial rule. The work is not a neutral ethnography: Guaman Poma wrote to a Spanish king, selectively reorganized Andean history, and used Christian categories alongside Indigenous ones. Interpretation depends heavily on image-text comparison.