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Andeanists have long bemoaned the dearth of readable pre-Hispanic texts, as opposed to our colleagues in Mexico who can pore over at least a few pictographic codices and maps as counterpoint to colonial chronicles. In this absence, Andeanists have turned fruitfully to material culture, reading vessels, textiles, architecture, and other artifacts for clues to social and cultural life before the Spanish Conquest. But the pre-Hispanic Andes were not without any means of preserving information: khipus, complicated knotted-string records, were used for accounting purposes throughout the Inca Empire. The contents of khipus have remained frustratingly elusive for scholars, although many sallies have been made, most prominently by ethnomathematicians who have come up with ingenious explanations for the numeric systems supposedly encoded in the various knots and colored strings (e.g., Marcia Ascher and Robert Ascher, The Code of the Quipu, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1981). But apart from a purported seventeenth-century text (dismissed by many scholars as a forgery) that offers a key to a narrative khipu, no one has yet been able to read a pre-Hispanic khipu in its entirety.The debate has centered upon whether khipus were purely mnemonic devices— the meanings of whose knots and strings were randomly determined by their makers and hence unreadable by anyone else—or whether there was a systematic grammar used throughout the empire, such that anyone who knew it could read any khipu (and likewise a modern scholar, should she crack the code). All agree that the patterns of knots embed a numeric system of some kind; the question is whether larger semantic structures were also embedded in their construction.Urton’s synthetic study of khipus takes into consideration previous hypotheses but breaks new ground in rethinking exactly what they were and how they might, someday, be read. He argues that many khipus encoded both decimal and narrative information, much of which might be retrievable by systematic analysis of khipu structure. Urton’s conclusions are provocative, but the process by which he reaches them is a marvel of elegant and creative thinking. Readers need not accept all the steps of his argument; in fact, one of the pleasures of the text is his openness to alternative readings or outright rejections of his hypotheses. But he has produced a fascinating study of Inca mentalité by forcing us to investigate k é hipus in the cultural context within which they were produced.Building upon the Aschers’ notion of insistence (like structuralist anthropology or Bourdieu’s habitus), whereby the Incas are assumed to have unconsciously reproduced certain types of structures and relations throughout all their practices, Urton fixes upon a type of duality as the central structuring element in that civilization. Urton’s major contribution is to recognize the physicality of the production of the khipu, seeing it as a process in which the artisan is constantly making binary choices, to which meaning may be attached. For example, a strand may be made of wool or cotton; it may be twisted to the maker’s right or left; knots may be made in one direction or the other. Inca duality was not egalitarian; it ascribed hierarchy and differential meanings to various binary choices (for example, moiety organization within communities was dualistic but assymetrical, with one moiety having precedence over the other). This leads Urton to the hope that, once hundreds of khipus have been painstakingly described with respect to their binary coding structure, patterns in binary choices might reveal inherent meanings to modern scholars.Urton compares this process with the binary code at the foundation of modern computing; here his metaphor forces him to torture the data a little. For example, because khipus contained fibers of various colors, Urton reduces color schemes to two (light rainbow, dark rainbow), drawing upon fieldwork in a contemporary Andean community (p. 110). Given that we don’t really know who produced the fibers that khipukamayoqs manipulated, this may be far afield indeed. But the recognition that khipus contain a conscious decision-making process that mirrors the duality that saturates Andean society is indeed a contribution, even if that process may have been less extensive than Urton’s calculations allow.This elegant and concise study, illustrated with ample photographs, will appeal to Andeanists seeking to understand khipus in the Inca context but also contributes to the ongoing debate around nonalphabetic literacies in the precontact world. Urton has done a remarkable job of making the complexities of ethnomathematics and computing accessible to the nonspecialist; even if his hypotheses are eventually overturned, this book will remain an important contribution to Andean studies.
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