Indigenous peoples in the Americas had a vibrant and long-lasting tradition of carving, painting, writing texts, recording data, and producing manuscripts to serve both sacred and mundane needs in their respective societies. Priests, scribes, diviners, and other elite specialists conceived, wrote, and consulted texts written in pictographic or hieroglyphic writing or kept statistics using knotted cords. They wrote and kept count in all manner of formats for private and public consumption.
After European contact, and except for those manuscripts concerned with matters of religion and ritual, the production and function of pictorial documents by Mesoamerican scribes and khipus by Inka “keepers” continued in the service of local Indigenous and European authorities.
For early scholars such as William Gates, Frans Blom, and their successors these painted manuscripts were examples of Amerindian-European syncretism. They were highly valued for what they could teach about early Indigenous writing and accounting systems. Recent approaches to these documents emphasize the agency of Indigenous peoples in their continued use of ancient writing traditions and counting conventions throughout the Spanish colonial period.