Counting the Khipus: How Many Are There to Study?
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”
Have We Found the “Rosetta Khipus”?
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.
An Underrecognized Doctoral Thesis on Inka Khipus: Antonia Molina Muntó, 1975
As in many academic fields, unpublished PhD dissertations on khipus can be difficult to locate and are largely underrecognized.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
A Numerical Connection Between Two Khipus: An Informal Description
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
Memories of Bob Ascher, author of Code of the Quipu
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