One manuscript per voice

Claim (verbatim)

Every major text authored by an indigenous Andean in the colonial period survives in exactly one manuscript: Guaman Poma's 1,189-page Nueva coronica y buen gobierno (GKS 2232 4to, Royal Danish Library, unknown until Pietschmann announced it in 1908), the Huarochiri manuscript — the only book-length account of an Andean religious world in Quechua — bound among Francisco de Avila's papers in Madrid, Pachacuti Yamqui's Relacion de antiguedades in the same Madrid codex, Titu Cusi Yupanqui's 1570 Instruccion in the Escorial. The Spanish chroniclers of the same world multiplied in copies and editions; the one Andean-born author with a printing history, Garcilaso, is the one who moved to Spain and lived beside the press. The mechanism is access, not merit: indigenous books entered the record as single archival objects in official custody — an extirpator's file, a viceregal mailing, a royal library — never as editions, and each survivor is therefore a density estimate for peers that got zero copies. Blas Valera's lost chronicle, surviving only in Garcilaso's quotations, shows the modal fate. Prediction: in a witness census built text by text from the Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, the median manuscript-witness count for works authored before 1650 by indigenous or mestizo writers resident in the Andes will be exactly one, with none printed before 1800, while a majority of Spanish-authored Peruvian chronicles in the same guide will show two or more witnesses or a pre-1700 printing (primary clause: the median of exactly one witness for the Andean-resident indigenous class; the verdict follows it). Kill: the text-by-text witness and edition registers in Joanne Pillsbury, ed., Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, 1530-1900 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008, 3 vols), with the Royal Danish Library's open digitization of GKS 2232 4to; the computation is a median over witness counts by author class.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in a witness census built text by text from the Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, the median manuscript-witness count for works authored before 1650 by indigenous or mestizo writers resident in the Andes will be exactly one, with none printed before 1800, while a majority of Spanish-authored Peruvian chronicles in the same guide will show two or more witnesses or a pre-1700 printing (primary clause: the median of exactly one witness for the Andean-resident indigenous class; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the text-by-text witness and edition registers in Joanne Pillsbury, ed., Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, 1530-1900 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008, 3 vols), with the Royal Danish Library's open digitization of GKS 2232 4to; the computation is a median over witness counts by author class.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The single-witness status of each major indigenous Andean text is famous case by case (Guaman Poma's GKS 2232 4to; the Huarochiri codex among Avila's papers, which Salomon calls the only book-length Quechua account of an Andean religious world), but no class-level witness census computing the median across indigenous-authored works and contrasting it with Spanish-authored chronicles has been run.

• F. Salomon & G.L. Urioste, The Huarochiri Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion (University of Texas Press, 1991)
• R. Adorno, Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (University of Texas Press, 1986; 2nd ed. 2000)
• J. Pillsbury (ed.), Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, 1530-1900, 3 vols (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.