records the age of each Inca ruler at death, as well as a cumulative duration of
the dynasty, which is essentially the running sum of the lifespans of rulers.
Although many scholars find this chronicle invaluable for developing native
Andean perspectives on the Incas, no one takes seriously a span of reigns that
averages well over a century. The royal chronology written by Antonio Vázquez
de Espinosa in his 1628 Compendio y descripción de las Indias occidentales
(Compendium and Description of the West Indies) has also been largely ignored
in recent scholarship. This sequence is just over 500 years long (AD 1031–1532)
and presents the shortest average length of reign, partly because the author
includes two rulers—Pachacuti and Inca Yupanqui—who are normally treated as
the same individual in other king lists.
None of the sequences described above was published during the Colonial
period. The lack of an established chronology throughout the Colonial period
made it possible to write new histories that lacked chronology, such as Vasco de
Contreras y Valverde’s 1649 history of Cuzco, or to propose new estimates for
the dynasty and for individual reigns, as Juan Mogrovejo de la Cerda did in
- New chronologies continued to appear until the final days of Spanish rule;
late sequences included those by Juan de Velasco (1789) and Hipólito Unánue
(1793). During the nineteenth century, the emergence of a scholarly tradition of
archival research led to the gradual publication of sources such as Cabello
Valboa (1840), the quipu testimony (1892), Sarmiento de Gamboa (1906),
Guaman Poma de Ayala (1936), and Vázquez de Espinosa (1942).
The availability of Colonial chronologies raised the question of which
sequence, if any, could be treated as historically reliable. In his monumental
History of the Conquest of Peru, William Prescott concluded that the number of
Inca rulers in the recorded king lists could not account for the timespan
presented in sequences by Cabello Valboa or Velasco, and he raised doubts about
the interpretive value of many of the chronicle accounts—“so imperfect were the
records employed by the Peruvians, and so confused and contradictory their
traditions, that the historian finds no firm footing on which to stand till within a
century of the Spanish conquest” (Prescott 1847). Prescott’s history remained
influential well into the twentieth century, when the spread of archaeological
research introduced new chronological concerns.
In 1931, Philip Ainsworth Means published Ancient Civilizations of the Andes,
in which he sought to place Inca and pre-Inca cultures into a general
chronological framework derived from the seventeenth-century chronicle of
Garcilaso de la Vega. The pioneering Inca scholar John H. Rowe challenged