carry out inquests on a variety of matters—including encomienda rights,
mining, Inca mummies, and the ceques of Cuzco—for Peruvian viceroys
beginning with La Gasca, in the late 1540s, to Toledo, in the 1570s.
While Polo Ondegardo produced copious documents on administrative and
historical matters, few of them actually contain his signature, or were issued
under his name. He appears to have been a major source of information for
contemporary chroniclers and for those who followed the administration of
Viceroy Toledo (1569–1581). Most notably, Polo Ondegardo studied the
ritual organization of Inca Cuzco by means of the ceques, and he appears to
have been the author of a “chart of the ceques,” which has never been found
but which is thought to have been the source for the chronicler Bernabé
Cobo’s detailed description of that system.
Polo Ondegardo’s most informative work relevant to the study of the Incas
was his Errores y supersticiones de los indios (Errors and Superstitions of the
Indians), which was completed in 1559 and was included in the documents
published by the Third Lima Provincial Church Council, of 1583. Polo
Ondegardo was in Cuzco assisting Viceroy Toledo and his historian, Pedro
Sarmiento de Gamboa, in their investigation of the Inca past; some of the
information he gathered, such as that on Inca mummies, was incorporated in
Sarmiento’s Historia Indica (History of the Incas), completed in 1572.Further Reading
Polo Ondegardo, Juan. “Report by Polo de Ondegardo.” In Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the
Yncas, translated and edited by Clements R. Markham, 149–71. Works issued by the Hakluyt Society,
no. 48. London: Hakluyt Society, 1873. New York: Burt Franklin, 1963, 1964, and 1969.
———. El Orden del Inca: Las contribuciones, distribuciones y la utilidad de guardar dicho orden (s.
XVI). Edited by Andrés Chirinos and Martha Zegarra. Lima: Editorial Commentarios, 2013.
Presta, Ana María, and Catherine Julien. “Polo Ondegardo (ca. 1520–1575).” In Guide to Documentary
Sources for Andean Studies, 1530–1900, edited by Joanne Pillsbury, vol. 3, 529–35. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.
■GARY URTONPUQUINA
Puquina is a language that has been extinct since around the second half of the
nineteenth century, and is known only from a handful of pastoral materials
compiled in the late sixteenth century by the Franciscan Jerónimo de Oré and
published in 1607. As with Quechua and Aymara, the name of the language