Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu (Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture)

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Description

The Inka Empire stretched over much of the length and breadth of the South American Andes, encompassed elaborately planned cities linked by a complex network of roads and messengers, and created astonishing works of architecture and artistry and a compelling mythology—all without the help of a graphic writing system. Instead, the Inkas’ records consisted of devices made of knotted and dyed strings—known as khipu—on which they recorded information pertaining to the organization and history of their empire. Despite more than a century of research on these remarkable devices, the khipu remain in large part undeciphered.

In this benchmark book, twelve international scholars tackle the most vexed question in khipu studies: how did the Inkas record and transmit narrative records by way of knotted strings? The authors approach the problem from quite a lot of angles. Several essays mine Spanish colonial sources for details about the kinds of narrative encoded in the khipu. Others look at the uses to which khipu were put before and after the Conquest, in addition to their current use in some latest Andean communities. Still others analyze the formal characteristics of khipu and are looking for to provide an explanation for how they encode quite a lot of kinds of numerical and narrative data.

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