Treasure Hunting and the Colonial Imagination of Indigenous Pasts, 1500–1700

In 1590, an Augustinian friar reported that, two decades earlier, an Incan man from Cuzco had told him where to find “all the treasure that the Incas have hidden in [that] city.” Around the same time, another Augustinian friar, also claiming Indigenous guidance, received royal authorization to excavate the site “where the Inca left buried his treasure” in Quito. Twenty-five years later, a third friar “persuaded and guided some old indios, who have been entrusted with the care of the treasures of the Incas . . . to reveal and uncover them.” Similar licenses circulated in Mexico City targeting “hidden treasure from the time of Montezuma,” while retellings of Muisca lore spurred the draining of Lake Guatavita near Bogotá.

This paper examines how Spaniards in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries came to understand or imagine the pre-Hispanic Americas and Indigenous experiences of conquest through the lens of buried treasure. Drawing from treasure-hunting licenses, petitions, and chronicles, I argue that missionaries and settlers constructed narratives about Inca, Muisca, and Mexica history, with varying degrees of accuracy, to legitimize the extraction of hidden wealth. Indigenous knowledge was sought with predatory intent as the pre-Hispanic and early colonial past became a means for post-conquest enrichment. In this way, treasure hunting was a mechanism through which early modern Spaniards learned about, imagined, and thereby sought to possess the material remains of Indigenous history.