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By Root 1829 0

been developed in the region. And these cultures were unique, if Urton is right. Their books were loose bundles of string—more practical, in some ways, than paper scrolls or books, because less susceptible to water damage and physical pressure. They were read both tactilely, by running the fingertips along the knots, and visually, by looking at the colors of the strings. And whereas the choice of letters and words at the beginning of a sentence or paragraph exercise little constraint on physical connection to those at the end, the choices made by the khipu maker at the beginning of a string could not be undone halfway through. As a result, each khipu pendant provided a burst of information at the beginning that was refined further down the string.

However anomalous to European eyes, this form of writing has deep roots in Andean culture. Knotted-string communication was but one aspect of these societies’ exploration of textile technology (see Chapter 3). In these cultures, Heather Lechtman, of MIT, has argued, cloth “was the most important carrier of status, the material of choice for the communication of message, whether religious, political, or scientific.” Similarly, Urton told me, binary oppositions were a hallmark of the region’s peoples, who lived in societies “typified to an extraordinary degree by dual organization,” from the division of town populations into complementary “upper” and “lower” halves (moieties, in the jargon) to the arrangement of poetry into dyadic units. In this environment, he said, “khipu would be familiar.”

At the same time, Urton and other khipu specialists have been searching for an Inka Rosetta stone—a colonial translation of an extant khipu. One candidate exists—maybe. In 1996, Clara Miccinelli, an amateur historian from the Neapolitan nobility, caused a stir by announcing that she had unearthed in her family archives both a khipu and its Spanish translation (it encoded a folk song). But because the putative khipu isn’t made the same way as other surviving khipus and the same documents also claim that Pizarro conquered the Inka empire by poisoning its generals with arsenic-adulterated wine, many U.S. scholars have questioned their authenticity. Angered by the doubts, Miccinelli has thus far refused to let non-Italian researchers examine the documents, although she did allow an Australian laboratory to evaluate their age with a mass spectrometer. (The results, published in 2000, suggest that they are from the fifteenth century.) Because of the controversy, most researchers have been, according to Brokaw, “strategically ignoring” the Italian documents, at least for the present.

More widely accepted are the thirty-two khipu found in a tomb in the Peruvian Amazon in 1996, one of which Urton tentatively deciphered as a census record for the area in late pre-Hispanic times. With the help of a MacArthur fellowship he received in 2001, he has been searching Peruvian archives for something with more narrative content to match against the other khipu—a quest, according to Julien, that “has a chance of bearing fruit.” If Urton’s quest or others like it are successful, she told me, “We may be able to hear the Inkas for the first time in their own voice.”

I asked what she thought that voice might sound like—the voice of people attuned to tension and cloth, people who saw the stones of the world charged with spirit, people who had never seen animals larger than a llama, people who broke the world into complementary halves and thought more in terms of up and down than north and south, people who took in information about the world through their fingers.

“Foreign,” she said.

APPENDIX C

The Syphilis Exception

No one doubts today that European bacteria and viruses had a ruinous effect on the Americas. So, too, did African diseases like malaria and yellow fever when they arrived. The question inevitably arises as to whether there were any correspondingly lethal infections from the Americas, payback to the conquistadors. One candidate was long ago nominated: syphilis.

Syphilis is caused by Treponema