The recording of Andean data and histories in Peru before and after the arrival of Spanish conquistadors invites us to reflect about the place of the oral word and speech acts, and their function in the transmission and development of knowledge in Western societies. The European fixation with the written word was brought to the Americas in the last decade of the fifteenth century. This fixation confronted Indigenous languages and their ways to organize and record knowledge. In this article, I examine the dialogic tension between orality and writing as well as the performance of the oral word, its participants, and the written records of this orality found in Spanish-Andean documents of the early colonial archive.