Tamara Estupiñán Viteri is a professional historian with a degree in History from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador. She was the first woman graduate in the country in a career that only began in the 1980s. She also holds a master’s degree in history, with a specialisation in Andean history, from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences of Ecuador (FLACSO). For more than 20 years, she was head of the Historical Research Department, covering cultural and economic history, at the Museum and Cultural Programmes of the Central Bank of Ecuador. In addition to this expertise, she has more than 40 years of research experience in archives, libraries and in the field, both in Ecuador and abroad. Her scientific work has been recognised with major awards and prestigious national and international scholarships. In 2012, she was incorporated as a corresponding member of the National Academy of History of Ecuador and currently works as a research associate with Archival City-Quito in collaboration with the University of San Francisco de Quito.

What are your research themes and your approaches?

The expertise in archival, library and field work deployed for more than four decades, together with a solid theoretical training in the career of historical sciences, have been the pillars that have allowed me to venture in a multifaceted way both in disciplines of the human sciences and in those of the exact sciences, to produce research of high scientific rigour with added value, innovation and methodological and theoretical impact in the local, regional and international spheres. In my book El mercado interno en la Audiencia de Quito (1997), I systematised the information from notarial protocols books and elaborated a time series for a pre-statistical period, such as the colonial period, 16th-18th centuries.

The time series was calibrated using mathematical and physical methods derived from Artificial Intelligence, specifically backpropagation neural networks. This was the first time that this methodology was applied to research in the human sciences, something that until then had only been exclusive to the exact sciences, a challenge for which, together with the mathematician Melio Sáenz and the physicist Edward Jiménez, we received the IBM First Prize at the V Meeting of Scientific Calculus and Industrial Informatics; this was more than 25 years before the current heyday of Artificial Intelligence.

The time series, in turn, was the backbone I used to argue that the internal market of the Audiencia of Quito had a different economic rhythm to what the Argentinean professor Sempat Assadourian proposed in relation to the cycles of silver production from the Potosí hill, and I discussed that a local economy such as Quito’s was not subordinated to that centre and that there were no carry-over effects either, thus nuancing the theoretical model. At the same time, and using information from the notarial protocols books, I conceived the book Diccionario básico del comercio colonial quiteño (1997), which was awarded the José Mejía Lequerica prize as the best work published in the field of National History and Political Science in 1997 in Ecuador.

For many years, I advised on several projects of architectural restoration of pre-Hispanic, colonial and republican monuments, for example, my book Una familia republicana, los Martínez Holguín, was the basis for the regeneration of La Liria farmhouse located in the city of Ambato, which rescued a 19th century botanical garden and, in addition, a property of historical significance for the province of Tungurahua and Ecuador. This inquiry was awarded the Isabel Tobar Guarderas prize as the best work published in Social Sciences in 1988 in our country.

The know-how of primary and secondary sources that I have about the history of Ecuador, allows me to write in a short time research such as the book Volcán Pichincha, erupciones, destrucciones e invenciones, to give a historical and scientific answer about the volcanological phenomenon that shook the city of Quito during 1998, and that due to its scientific rigour and timely publication became a sort of “best seller” during that year.

You are also an expert in palaeography and ethnohistory. How does your research contribute to the economic and cultural history of Quito and Ecuador?

Indeed, my skills in 16th and 17th century palaeography contributed to my discovery, transcription and publication (1988) of the last will written in 1582 by the most important son of Atahuallpa Ticci Cápac, the last Inca emperor of the Tahuantinsuyo, and who was christianised as Francisco Topatauchi (fig.1).

Figure 1- Testament of Francisco Topatauchi, son of Atahuallpa Ticci Cápac

During the last two decades, from the perspective of ethnohistory, I have contributed to the clarification of the decline of the Inca empire and the Spanish conquest in the Andes, a confrontation that gave rise to a new political, economic and social order. An important historiographical contribution is my book, Tras las huellas de Rumiñahui… (2003), in which I make a severe historiographical critique of the figure of a “Quiteño hero”, who needed to be demystified in order to point towards a more realistic understanding of his role in the events surrounding the death of Atahuallpa.

The figure of Rumiñahui turned my commitment as a researcher upside down, as I had to delve into the critical reading of the chronicles of the Indies and the literature published between the 16th and 17th centuries, review old maps, compare unpublished documentary records with fieldwork, calculate distances, interpret toponymy and anthroponymy, examine ethnomomy, compare old images with colonial texts, to travel inhospitable roads and rugged geographies, to discover the archaeological ruins of Inca origin located in Malqui (2004) and Machay (2010), southwest of the city of Quito, in the Sigchos region of the province of Cotopaxi, and which, according to my ethnohistorical hypothesis, would have been the emblematic site to which the mortal remains of Atahuallpa were taken after his execution in Cajamarca.

The discovery of Malqui–Machay linked me institutionally with the French Institute of Andean Studies, which gave an international echo about the possible repository of Atahuallpa’s mummy in the region of Sigchos. The coincidence of this finding with the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Machu Picchu meant that my discovery went beyond the national and regional sphere and acquired worldwide scientific notoriety.

Figure 2- First visit of Dr George Lomné, Director of the French Institute of Andean Studies to Malqui-Machay, 2011.

After the unveiling of Malqui-Machay, I identified a cultural and natural corridor between the archaeological ruins and the Quilotoa volcano lagoon and the town of Pujilí, to reconstruct the private property of greatest symbolic value that Atahuallpa would have had and that was inherited by his son Francisco Topatauchi, the auqui or successor prince, and to whom it would have corresponded to receive the mascapaycha, tassel or crown, on the death of his father. It was in this space that the only ayllu of the Inca nobility that survived the Spanish conquest was established and was responsible for preserving and caring for the symbols that united them as a corporate group, as I argue in my article “El Puxilí de los yngas, el ayllu de la nobleza incaica que cuidó de los restos mortales de Atahuallpa Ticci Cápac”, published in the Revista de Historia de América, Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia (2018).

Figure 3- First pilgrimage to Malqui-Machay, blessing with ancestral practices to Pachamama (mother earth), 2011.

The chronicles of the Indies, the literature of the time, historiography from linguistics and philology, contributed to the conception of my latest book, entitled “Voces quechuas e híbridas para el estudio de la conquista inca de Quito” (Quechua and hybrid voices for the study of the Inca conquest of Quito), now in the process of being published. It is a pioneering compilation of hundreds of words of Quechua, Aymara, Puquina and vernacular origin of more than 1100 pages and 300 drawings from the 16th-18th centuries, which has been organised diachronically with comprehensive and thematic concepts, rather than alphabetically.

Figure 4- Archival City team visit to the Sanctuary of the Divine Child of Isinchi, the huanca (protective totem) on the San Juan creek, 2020.

Can you tell us a bit more about your collaboration with Archival City Project? What about  the data base called LIBRA and the main sources you used to build it?

My personal long term research commitment of history and ethnohistory, through mathematics, physics, economics, volcanology, geography, architecture, botany, linguistics, anthropology and archaeology, has resulted in a specific end product called LIBRA, a mega-database of more than 30,000 quantitative and qualitative documentary records, which is about to be donated to the “Archival City. Bridging Urban Past and Future” project.

LIBRA database was conceived from the 1980s. Since then, time has passed, during which it was fed, sometimes even packed -in a figurative sense- with data and numbers, day by day, year by year, decade by decade, until building a corpus of information characterized by organization, rigor and accuracy.

The main source of this mega-database is notarial protocol books. They contain an archetypal biography of a town or region, the documentation for which was generated – and continues to be generated – by a notary public or scribe, who was responsible for recording the various transactions on a day-to-day basis. These mainly concerned material goods, real estate or personal property, ranging from the sale of a small plot of land to that of a large estate or hacienda, the purchase of imported or locally produced goods, the recording of precious metals to finance the war against imperial enemies and/or pirates, or for the payment of taxes, or for the acquisition of capital goods – such as iron – or for the slave trade, the creation of companies, the assignment of rights, syndics, marriage dowries, censuses and almshouses, among others.

Quito, unlike Cusco, has the oldest notarial protocol books in the Andean region (1562), and the collection, as such, represents the most complete section of Ecuador’s National History Archive, with the advantage that, despite the constant manipulations to which they have been subjected, they are maintained in a good state of preservation and there are few “lost books”.

The notary or scribe was a competent person, trained in his profession, who had exclusive jurisdiction or a monopoly over transactions carried out in a town or region: his task was to draw up, authorise and certify, according to a specific preconceived structure, a form such as, for example, a last will or a letter for the sale and purchase of land or goods, or a transfer of shares, or a marriage dowry, or a transaction, or a contract, or a power of attorney letter, and so on. What the notary public or scribe wrote on paper had probative evidence and its content guaranteed a type of “truth”, which was not the official truth.

Every notarial deed was guaranteed. Such was the confidence and security in this variety of documents that, despite the scarcity of fractional or circulating money and the non-existence of a monetary reserve, it was these legal documents that sustained the money market of the time. Notarial protocol books were produced both in societies characterised by a common wealth legal system – based on custom or common law and not on written regulations – and in the written law system, the successor to Roman law: the basis of the continental law system and today’s civil codes. The source of the notarial protocols books is therefore exceptional, as it enables the differences between common law and written law societies to be reconciled.

In this sense, we can say that it is a transversal historical source of urban archives, for the past, the present and the future: a bridge in time, which also allows a common methodology for the study of cities. But it is not just any bridge, it is a rather amorphous bridge, like the historical processes of humanity, with tensors that come together to form interstices. It is precisely in these interstices that structural changes or variations from the status quo ante occur. Being able to detect these interstices is a task, and I believe that the notarial protocols books are a plausible alternative.

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