Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu

PREFACE

P R E F A C E Jeffrey Quilter In 1922, the founder of modern Mesoamerican iconographic research, Eduard Seler, died in Berlin. Although a number of important advances in the study of Maya hieroglyphic writing had already been accomplished, the field was still in its infancy.1 A year later, in 1923, L. Leland Locke published The Ancient Quipu or Peruvian Knot Record, in which he presented the basic understanding of khipu maintained to the present. Despite an early precociousness, however, the study of khipu has lagged far behind the decipherment of Maya glyphs. This seems all the more remarkable because Mayanists were handicapped for decades by Sir J. Eric Thompson, who, though he was only just entering Cambridge University in 1922, later actively discouraged acceptance of the glyphs as true writing. Though Locke did not have as much influence over Andean studies as a whole as did Thompson over Mayanist studies, he was insistent that khipu only recorded numbers. A principal goal of this book is to question that dictum. Given that Maya hieroglyphs and Andean khipu are two of the very few elaborated record-keeping systems of the ancient New World, why have investigations in one advanced so rapidly in comparison to the other? The answer to this question is not straightforward. One simple factor is that there are far more Mesoamericanists than Andeanists. The countries of Middle America have been easier to reach from Europe and the United States than those of the distant Andes. Thus, more and a greater variety of scholars from afar have traveled to the lands of the Maya, creating a fairly large international scholarly community. x i v Jeffrey Quilter It may also be argued that initial conditions for scholarly research have kept Mesoamerican and Andean studies following early established directions . Although Seler had wide-ranging interests in all of the Americas, he specialized in Mesoamerica. His legacy, as well as those of other Mesoamericanist scholarly pioneers, engendered subsequent generations of students who continued working in the same areas and on the same problems as their predecessors while training the next generation of scholars, who did the same. Another factor that has helped to encourage Maya studies is the attraction Maya art and architecture have had for Westerners. Even though we now know that much of the tropical forest was cut down to support Maya centers , the discovery of ruins ‘‘lost’’ within dark jungles appealed to nineteenthcentury romantic sensibilities. When the forest was cut back, ruins exposed, and tombs opened, Maya art was found to be mysterious but not entirely unapproachable . Here were depicted human forms bedecked in elaborate costumes performing bizarre rituals, or monkey-headed figures swaggering with strange accouterments. Although debate raged as to whether these were gods or kings, the art was original, attractive, and recognizable as representational to a greater or lesser degree. Peering at the remains of this strange ancient world, early explorers found glyphs everywhere. They were carved on buildings, painted on ceramics, incised into jades, bone, and shell. They wrapped themselves around lintels and doorways. They covered the backs of stelae and the fronts of large panels and were delicately painted in the few Maya books preserved from destruction by the Spaniards. The sheer quantity of hieroglyphs used in Maya elite life and the way texts were inextricably associated with art made them impossible to ignore. And, not least of all, the glyphs were beautiful. The labor and skill it took to carve them in limestone or jade and the ways in which the symbols themselves were ornamented or varied to produce an aesthetic statement of their own, in addition to what they may have said, left no doubt that the Maya considered these signs as important and valuable. Maya hieroglyphics were exotic and strange, but though arguments were made as to what these signs said, it was rarely doubted that they said something. Sir Eric Thompson slowed the course of the study of Maya writing because he believed that the glyphs could not be deciphered and that they only offered information on calendrics and astronomy. They could not be deciphered, he believed, because the system on which they were based was not a logical one and the glyphs were not constructed phonetically. Information on calendrics and astronomy was of interest, but, in Thompson’s opinion, studying these arcane topics would not advance the understanding of larger issues of Maya [3.142.197.212] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 06...