Scholarly narratives about the past usually offer an illusion: all the pieces neatly fit into a coherent narrative. That's the mastery of a good artisan. But behind every article, dissertation, or book lies the chaos and messiness of the past. Working in Andean colonial history allowed me to draw the curtain and reflect on what is often omitted in historical accounts: the challenges of working in the archive. I'm researching how Spanish colonialism redefined indigenous people's relationship to nature in colonial Peru. The challenges of studying the native experience of these changes are due not only to the reading of early modern Spanish legal handwriting, of which Don Quixote said "that Satan himself will not understand," but also to the quality of its preservation. The most telling documents usually come from rural areas where Spaniards and natives fought to secure access to natural resources. Unfortunately, scribes in these regions sometimes used low-quality ink that damaged the manuscripts and made them unreadable over the years, as seen dramatically in the picture. I am left wondering how these damages have shaped our understanding of rural Andean history and how to overcome this framing.