Encyclopedia of the Incas

majority of visita-based documentation in archives today pertains to the
collection of data on censuses and tributes from Colonial indigenous
communities, as well as inquests by state officials into issues that ranged from
how those communities were organized and taxed under the Incas, to inquiries
concerning the effects of earthquakes, floods, and other catastrophic events.
Religious visitadores investigated matters that concerned the Church, such as the
accuracy of parish registries and the scrutiny of the conversion and religious
instruction of Native parishioners. To the degree that such early Colonial
inquiries concerned the organization of communities under the Incas in the past,
or the views of contemporary Natives on the Incas and their institutions and
practices of local governance, such documents are of inestimable value for
helping researchers today to construct accounts of the Inca world.
The tradition of sending out visitadores to investigate matters in the
countryside began almost as soon as the Spaniards imprisoned Atahualpa in
Cajamarca in 1534. That year, Francisco Pizarro ordered a visita to be carried
out relating to the awarding of Native peoples to two Spaniards in grants known
as encomienda (the grant of oversight of a group of Native peoples to a Spaniard
who had the responsibility for their welfare and religious conversion in exchange
for the right to collect tribute from them). Major programs of administrative
visitas took place in 1540 and 1543, and a large-scale visitation and tribute
assessment was carried out by Pedro de la Gasca in 1549–1550. Few of the
documents produced by these inquests have been found in archives to date. From
the earliest visitas, Colonial officials worked closely with local record keepers,
the quipucamayocs (see Quipu) to compare Inca population counts and tribute
levels, reckoning these data to the Colonial circumstances. Both Inca and
Colonial inspectors ensured that all people who were subject to inspection were
counted in the census procedure. Hiding from census takers was a crime under
the Incas, and it was the cause of strong censure of local headmen, the curacas,
in Spanish Colonial times.
Two of the most complete visitas, which have been used by modern scholars to
great advantage in investigating Inca provincial organization, were those carried
out in 1562 by Iñigo Ortiz de Zúñiga, in Huánuco, in the central Peruvian
highlands, and another undertaken in 1567 by Garci Diez de San Miguel, in
Chucuito, on the southwestern shore of Lake Titicaca. The visitadores who led
these investigations collected a wide range of information including the name,
age, sex, position, and economic status of tribute payers and the members of
their households. These data have proved extremely useful for historical