In this space, we occasionally highlight new publications of interest to readers. Our blog editor Mackinley FitzPatrick has just published a new paper in Latin American Antiquity about mathematical knot theory and its application to the study of khipus. Anyone can access an open version here. FitzPatrick’s paper asks
The 91st meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) was held in San Francisco, California from April 29th to May 3rd this year. Members of the Khipu Field Guide (KFG) team and collaborators were there to present on recent research and the ongoing outreach efforts of the KFG. Researchers
A few months ago, I had the opportunity to record khipu data for the first time at the Phoebe Hearst Museum in Berkeley, California. I wanted to share some reflections about the experience, especially given my position as a younger scholar.
I found myself returning to khipus with a different kind of curiosity: not archaeological or interpretive, but operational. Could the computational tools I work with every day be useful to the scholars who study these objects?
I was stunned. When I arrived at Museo Leymebamba, my goal had been to inventory and record every khipu housed there for my dissertation, but I had not expected to encounter one still completely tangled.
Museo Larco
Being able to see a khipu in person is incredibly important for researchers and enthusiasts. And as I am located in Australia, this means such opportunities either require significant travel to the khipu, or a rare experience such as this, where the khipu has come closer to me.
Waterfall khipu set
How can we relate what historical documentation tells us to the information we can extract from the archaeological khipus preserved in museums and private collections?
Growing up in Cusco, Peru—the Inca capital—I learned about khipus from a young age. Like many Peruvian students, I was told that the Incas and their predecessors did not learn to write or read. As a kid, surrounded by Cusco’s extraordinary Inca architecture, this never made sense to me.
You may have noticed in Ashok’s post – Can We Use AI for Khipu Decipherment? – that “recent surveys put the total number of surviving khipus today at around 1,300 to 1,600” and wondered how that count came about? The short answer: with a whole lot of hard work
Research and perspectives on khipus and Andean record-keeping, making khipu studies accessible to all.
One of the most frequent questions I get from both academics and the public is whether anything comparable to the Rosetta Stone exists for khipus. To the excitement, and disappointment, of nearly every audience I speak to, the answer is both yes and no.
As in many academic fields, unpublished PhD dissertations on khipus can be difficult to locate and are largely underrecognized. Anthropologist Carol Mackey’s “Knot Records in Ancient and Modern Peru” (1970) is perhaps the best known, though it is not the only one—nor the first—of its kind. Carlos
By way of introduction, I am a mathematician and data-lover and maker who, when growing up, also wanted to be an archaeologist and an art/ist teacher and an architect. I had long been fascinated by khipus before I first heard about The Khipu Field Guide (KFG) while listening
Writing under the pseudonym, Puck, Bob described his situation in the Anthropology Department at Cornell in the 1980s: “I spend two days a week on campus...I never visit the office of another professor except when I must do so on business...In my view, I run my own small
Translated using Google Translate (Leer el texto original en español) When I was presented with the idea of introducing an upcoming book in Spanish about quipus, my first thought was: I'm not the right person. After all, I'm neither an archaeologist nor a historian. Just someone
A new article[1] has been published in this month's issue of Antiquity. One of the authors, Manuel Medrano, is a founding member of the KhipuFieldGuide team. It's an intriguing paper, talking about the site of Monte Sierpe, in the Pisco Valley in Peru. Known as
Are Khipus a Written Language? For decades, scholars have debated whether khipus represent a true written language or simply an accounting tool.
On paper, it would seem like using artificial intelligence (AI) to decipher khipus, the intricate knotted cord recording devices of the Inka Empire, would be a perfect match...
