With her absorbing yet accessible accounts of the Peruvian world before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, María Rostworowski, who has died aged 100, brought the Incas to life for countless readers. Perhaps more than any intellectual in Peru, she reconfigured our understanding of the ancient Andean mind.
Her 1953 biography of the Inca emperor Pachacútec paved the way for the more extensive and groundbreaking Historia del Tahuantinsuyu (1988, translated in 1999 as History of the Inca Realm), which deconstructed the suppositions made by some Spanish colonial historians – including the very European idea that the Incas had an empire at all in the Roman, imperial sense. She argued it should be seen more as a trade confederation.
She also showed how Andean principles of kinship wove a complicated thread through Inca politics, which did not observe European principles of primogeniture but instead depended more on a matrilineal line of influence; nobody had written much previously about the mothers of Inca emperors.
María looked for documents that had never been studied before: the bureaucratic records of the courts, censuses and tax registers. Some of the most interesting material she found was in lawsuits brought by claimants just after the conquest. She uncovered a wealth of material, and about a dozen books and countless articles built up a picture of the pre-Columbian world in which the central element of reciprocity was stressed.
We are familiar with this from Japanese and, to a lesser extent, western customs (“we must invite them to our wedding as they invited us to theirs”), but in the Andes reciprocity became a dominating cultural influence greater even than military considerations. Some large Inca regional centres, such as Huánuco Pampa, were built not so much to impose military order on the local population – the European model – but to allow festivals of reciprocity to be held between themselves and the local tribes: toasts would be drunk and allegiances confirmed.
The impressive body of work María leaves behind tries to see pre-Columbian cultures with Andean eyes, not imposing easy western preconceptions on a world that tilted on an axis so different from our own.
She was born in Lima, to a Peruvian mother, Rita Tovar del Valle, and an aristocratic Polish father, Jan Jacek Rostworowski, who, she once told me, had “the wandering habits of a hippy before his time”. Her family moved to France when she was young and she had a lonely childhood. Then at 13 she went to Roedean, the girls’ boarding school in Sussex, characteristically not because she was sent there by her parents, but after choosing it herself and writing to the school: “My father took no interest in these things.”
The loneliness seems to have continued there: María had not foreseen the English regime of school sports, which she disliked; however, she learned to precis books, an invaluable tool for her later work. As she had no family in England she remained at the otherwise empty school for half-terms.
Later, her eccentric father took her back to Poland. She was intoxicated by the romance of Warsaw’s high society balls: “I married a Polish noble because he sang and danced well.” Her marriage to Count Zygmunt Broel-Plater produced a daughter, Christina, but ended in divorce.
Wanting also to explore her mother’s roots, María travelled to Peru in 1935, where she met Alejandro Diez Canseco, who later became her second husband. “I must have been only the second or third divorcee to get remarried in Lima, so it caused a scandal.” She set out to teach herself everything she could about her refound land of origin, then in the excited grip of the indigenismo movement, which celebrated pre-Columbian history.
After Diez Canseco died suddenly in 1961, María gave up her studies for a while and went to the jungle, to a leprosy hospital, just as Che Guevara had done in Peru, where she worked as a nurse: “The lepers gave me more and taught me more than I could ever give them.”
Age did not diminish her productivity. Well into her 90s, she continued with her Andeanist essays, handwritten as she refused to use a typewriter, let alone a computer. Indeed, she felt the later years of her life, after she was 60, were the most productive. In addition to a prodigious academic output, she created a children’s comic book on the Incas and wrote the text for a website; she was always aware of the need for Andeanists to write accessibly (her own books were admirably concise and clear) and for an audience outside their immediate peer group.
Until the last decade of her life, she went every day to her office at the Institute of Peruvian Studies in Lima, which she helped to found in 1964. When I once visited her there, she sat at a desk whose only ornament was a silver quilled pen. A simple grey filing cabinet was in the corner. Otherwise the room was completely bare with high ceilings, giving the effect, rather like the small woman herself, of an immense mental projection upwards.
With her permed hair and silk scarf around her neck in the style of the 1920s, María still spoke English with the meticulous upper-class accent of Roedean. “I dedicated 10 years to reading all the early Spanish chroniclers before I wrote a single word myself. I made index card entries of them all,” (she gestured at the filing cabinet) “and that was one of the most useful things I ever did. I am an autodidact. I have always been curious … I realised early on that the study of ancient Peru can take a lifetime.”
She is survived by Christina, and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
• María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, historian, born 8 August 1915; died 6 March 2016
