The Huarochiri Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion (Salomon and Urioste, trans.)

A critical scholarly translation, with extensive introduction and notes, of the Huarochiri Manuscript, a Quechua-language text compiled around 1608 under Spanish colonial-era ecclesiastical direction to record the religious traditions of the Huarochiri province of the central Peruvian Andes. Published by the University of Texas Press in 1991, it is the single most detailed surviving account of pre-Hispanic Andean religion in an indigenous language, and it documents Pariacaca, a mountain and storm deity who in the manuscript defeats the fire deity Huallallo Carhuincho and becomes the region's principal object of worship, along with his complex relationship to the female deity Chaupi Namca. Its strength is being a rare indigenous-language primary source rather than a Spanish chronicler's outside account. Its limit is that it survives in a single manuscript, compiled under a colonial extirpation campaign, so its editorial framing and omissions cannot be fully recovered.