The Virtual and the Real: The Case of the Mysterious Documents from Naples

Abstract

In 1996 Laura Laurencich Minelli, an archeologist at the University of Bologna announced the existence of a privately held series of documents and artifacts, known as the Naples documents,¹ which claimed to undermine historical consensus about the Inca Empire, the Spanish Conquest of the Andes, and the well-known historical sources. Most of the Naples documents were purportedly written by an enigmatic mestizo Jesuit, Blas Valera, whose works defending Inca culture and language had long been thought lost. These documents have created a series of acrimonious scholarly controversies over the authenticity of the Naples documents. The burden of proving the authenticity of the Naples documents, however, must lie with Laurencich Minelli and their other advocates, and to date, they have not done so.