Document Type

Article

Keywords

Relaciones geográficas, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Historical geography, Andean studies, Cartography

Disciplines

Classical Archaeology and Art History | Geography | Latin American History

Abstract

An important set of responses from the New World to a questionnaire published by the Spanish crown in 1577 is closely related to a survey project carried out in Spain during the same decade, but the American responses are called Relaciones Geograficas de lndias" to distinguish them from their Iberian kin. In addition their name is capitalized to set them apart from later royal survey projects of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (known genencally as relaciones geognificas). Within a decade or so of the 1577 printing of this questionnaire developed for the Americas, local officials everywhere, from backwater hamlets to bustling cities, penned their replies. The Relaciones Geograficas from the Indies were sent to Spain, where they became essential sources for Spanish historians. They were used, for instance, by Antonio de Herrera in his Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas, y tierrafirme del mar oceano (1934-57 [161-15]). Among this larger set of Relaciones Geograficas de Indias are to be found at least twenty-one from the Audiencia de Lima and the Audiencia de Quito, the Spanish administrative units comprising most of the Andes. These replies to the 1577 questionnaire were written in 1581-83, 1586, and possibly 1591. They contain invaluable source material due to the wide range of firsthand accounts they include of the early colonial Andes as well as for their informants' recollections of the Prehispanic period"--first paragraph

Publication Title

Contained in: Guide to documentary sources for Andean studies, 1530-1900 (Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 2008) ISBN 9780806199634

Article Number

1041

Publication status

Published

Publication Date

1-1-2008

Comments

Contained in: Guide to documentary sources for Andean studies, 1530-1900 (Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 2008) ISBN 9780806199634

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