Is it possible to discover anything of the views and experience of a people whose voices were hushed to a murmur more than 400 years ago? In the preface of his The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson declared in a splendid phrase his determination to rescue ordinary English working men and women from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity,’ and proceeded to do so. Rescuing the native peoples so casually appropriated to European uses (symbolic and material) over these last centuries presents essentially the same problems – the necessary dependence on outsider reports, for example – at an even more daunting level of intensity. Alien soldiers rarely make sensitive ethnographers. The Spaniards who conquered the peninsula, from Córdoba's ragged hopefuls to the hard men who fought the last campaigns, were concerned with survival and victory. What they saw they saw well: the shape and size of settlements; the swift obedience of commoners to their chiefs; goods produced and exchanged; how work was distributed. But it was a narrowly instrumental perspective, and one inevitably entailing distortion, as the unfamiliar was wrenched into familiar, and so potentially manipulable, forms.