Reyes, edades y épocas del Perú prehispánico

Abstract

The history of Prehispanic Peru is in a state of uncertainty ever since research from the perspective of cognitive anthropology (in the 1940s) and thereafter from that of structuralism (in the 1960s and 1970s) called into question the documentary value of the type of sources used until then to reconstruct such history. These sources are texts written after the inception of the Spanish conquest of Peru, in the 16^th century. In the 1940s, their contents started to be regarded and analyzed as mythological rather than historical. However, this revolutionary approach has not been accepted by a large number of scholars, who still assume that such texts can be dealt with as historical sources in the commonest sense of the expression. The author believes that the key to overcoming this discrepancy lies in the native concepts of history, time and space and argues for a way out of the deadlock after critically examining the chief contributions of the two schools of researchers. In essence, it is a matter of finding the right articulation between structure and history in a cultural tradition that is very much foreign to ours, as was that of Peru before the Spanish conquest.