Developing a relativistic concept of the pre-modern archive, this article considers the relationship between knowledge inside and outside the archive to determine how Spain's historical documents about its new American territories were kept and used. The starting assumption is that collections of documents about the Spanish Conquista circulated among people and were not permanently stored within fixed archival spaces, such as small lockable cases (arcas), private collections of documents (archivillos), or the actual state archives (archivos). This article thus re-evaluates the state of knowledge about the new American territories of Spain and its distribution across various archives and collections. It draws particular attention to the use of historical documents by official chroniclers of Spain and historians of the Conquista of the Spanish Americas.
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