The great majority of decorated qeros in collections are not Inca. They are colonial, made in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they look nothing like their predecessors. Where Inca vessels carry incised geometry, colonial ones carry figurative scenes in brilliant colour, executed in a technique of inlaid coloured resin that appears only after the conquest.
What those scenes show is the part that matters. Rainbows, processions, warriors in Inca dress, encounters with lowland peoples, agricultural work, feasts, and Inca lords in full regalia, painted by and for Andean people generations after the Inca state had been destroyed and its ruling line executed. Spanish elements appear in the compositions without displacing them. These are not nostalgic curiosities produced for a Spanish market; they are vessels made to be used in the drinking that maintained Andean obligation.
Read that way, the colonial qero is unusually direct evidence about what happened to Andean religion after the conquest. The extirpation campaigns went after conopas, mummies and shrines, and were documented in enormous detail. The qeros were being made the whole time, in greater numbers and with more elaborate imagery than before, and some southern Andean communities kept pairs of them in use into the twentieth century.