As a member of the Indigenous nobility raised under Spanish colonial rule in Perú, Juana was versed in both Iberian and Andean cultural practices. In this instance, her public request for an animal offering upon her burial was based on pre-Iberian Andean death practices. However, instead of requesting a llama, an animal native to the Andes, as would have been customary for the Andean elite before Spanish colonization, Juana chose a “Castilian sheep” and its lamb—an introduced species with long-held symbolic value within Christian ideology and Iberian agricultural life.⁵

Juana’s burial request is a powerful case study because it takes place in 1649—more than a century after the forced displacement and demographic decline of Indigenous communities due to the onset of Spanish colonial rule and widespread adoption of Catholicism in the Andes.⁶ Doña Juana’s request for a burial offering can therefore be viewed as a microcosm of the broader transformations in Andean conceptualizations of and relationships with the natural world and the divine throughout the seventeenth century.⁷ This paper contextualizes Doña Juana Flores’ request for an animal burial offering—seemingly at odds with her identity as a Christian Quechua noblewoman—in order to illustrate the persistence of Andean cosmologies regarding the natural world despite their hemispheric convergence with Iberian religious, cultural, and agricultural practices.⁸

A Burial Offering

Animal offerings at burials were not common in Europe following the Council of Trent (held from 1545 to 1563), and missionaries coming to the Andes continued to standardize burial practices there in an effort to align with this European precedent. Therefore, Juana’s request for an animal offering at her burial demonstrates that her Christianity was informed by more than just the local friars of Ámbar.⁹ To fully contextualize Juana’s burial request, it is necessary to understand the foundations of Andean cosmologies and religious practices.

The multi-faceted, embodied divinity of wak’as/huacas was, and remains, Central to Andean cosmologies. “To say that an object or place was [wak’a] implied that it was sacred and deserved reverence.” Early Spanish missionaries struggled to conceptualize the divinity of wak’as, as these entities take the form of “small figures…, peaks of mountains, important places, shrines, ancestors’ bodies…, or burial sites.” Wak’as exist as “present embodiments” of the divine “in natural, petrified forms” that connect Andean communities to a shared past.¹⁰

According to traditional Andean religious beliefs, in the beginning times, before the creation of mortal humans, the Andes were home to formidable god-persons (wak’as/huacas). As creators of the world, once these divine beings fulfilled their purpose or were bested by more “crafty or powerful” wak’as, they turned to stone in their bodily form or took the shape of other natural phenomena. Despite their transformations, wak’as became increasingly omnipotent as their human descendants continued to honor their eternal powers. As permanent features of the landscape and “living forces that remained ‘integrated’ in the world of their people,” wak’a ancestors watched over their descendant ayllus. Andeans understood the physical landscape as a manifestation of wak’as’ “guiding influence” and past deeds. The Quechua word for place or village, llacta, translates to “a triple entity”—one that forms from the convergence of an ancestor wak’a, its resting form, and “the group of people whom the [wak’a] engendered.”¹¹

Andeans who understood themselves as descendants of a particular wak’a regularly provided offerings in exchange for “continuing support and guidance.” Chinchaysuyu, the northwestern part of Tawantinsuyu, was home to Juana’s ancestors.¹² In 1615, Indigenous chronicler Guamán Poma de Ayala wrote that, before the arrival of the Spanish, the major wak’as of Chinchaysuyu included the Moon (Quilla), Venus (chasca cuyllor), lightning (chuqui ylla), and mountains such as Huarco and the Earth Maker (Pachacamac/Pacha Kamaq).¹³ These wak’as regularly received offerings such as guinea pigs (cuys), precious stones (uakari), seashells (mullo), maize (sara), coca leaves, corn beer (chicha), and llamas.¹⁴

To the dismay of Christian missionaries and the Roman Catholic Church, the “total” conversion of Indigenous communities and the “complete… extirpation of idolatry” from the Andes never came to fruition. Despite the Church’s extensive efforts to destroy Andean religious practices starting in the 1530s, in 1652—just three years following Doña Flores’ passing—Church officials still worried about the “persistent” veneration of wak’as across the Andes.¹⁵

Doña Juana’s request for an animal offering to be made upon at her burial—as was customary for the Indigenous elite prior to Spanish colonization—indicates that her worldview was as much Andean in practice as it was Iberian on paper. While her testament publicly affirmed her status as a Christian Quechua noblewoman, her request for an animal burial offering reveals that her understanding of the world remained deeply rooted in her Andean upbringing. Her decision to uphold this tradition serves as a testament to the inextricable bonds and interdependencies between Indigenous people and the natural world—connections that long defined, and continue to define, life in the Andes.¹⁶

The foundations of Andean society have long been based on principles of reciprocity and care. Anthropologists Bruce Mannheim and Guillermo Salas Carreño highlight that central to these principles in the Andes, both historically and today, is “food circulation and cohabitation” among all community members. This includes reciprocity between peers, parents and children, “people and their herds, people and their fields,” and between people and places more generally. In the Andes, “all social beings,” including mountains, rivers, plants, and animals, have always been “attributed thoughts, capacities of action, emotions, and intention.” These beliefs encompass the veneration bestowed on wak’as.¹⁷

Even accounting for the integration of Christian ideologies into daily life, food was and remains “the substance that constitutes and relates Quechua bodies.” Andeans like Juana related to others, both human and non-human, “through food sharing and continuous cohabitation.” This means that Andeans cohabitate with their physical environment in an interdependent relationship based on care. Juana was shaped by the Andes, with its snowy peaks and green valleys. She was formed by her relationships with the land of Ámbar throughout her life “through the provision of care and food as part of a wider process of continuous cohabitation.”¹⁸ This bond of cohabitation required that Juana nourish the land that had sustained her.

Endings as New Beginnings

Despite her public expression of devout Christianity, Doña Juana’s request for an animal offering reveals a more complex narrative. This burial request, which incorporated Indigenous Andean religious practices, occurred over a century after the onset of Spanish colonial rule, the subsequent state-led relocation of Indigenous groups through the Reducción general de los indios, and the widespread adoption of Christianity in the Andes.¹⁹ The Quechua noblewoman’s decision to request an animal offering underscores the survival of Indigenous relationships with the natural world that informed her relationship with place, particularly in and around Ámbar. In the Andes, each person derives sustenance, resources, and life from their birthplace, making it essential for Indigenous people like Juana to “renew [this relationship] routinely by feeding… a particular, named place.” This practice necessitated that “every request, cure, or plea to the places… [had] to be accompanied with food.” Juana’s reverence for both her wak’as and the Christian God is reflected in her burial offering, which acts as a “preparation and deliverance of food offerings” to maintain her relationship with the divine.²⁰ As these places provided for and nourished her, Juana, in turn, fed and cared for them. Her burial offering of a ewe and its lamb upon her grave can thus be interpreted as her fulfilling her duty of offering food in reciprocity to the sacred places in which she lived. In her final gesture of gratitude for Pachamama, or Earth Mother, Juana’s final act of reciprocity facilitated her transition into the next world, hanan pacha.²¹

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