Studying 'Materials in Human Experience'.(OF MATERIAL INTEREST)

Advanced Materials & Processes,  September, 2006  

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In 1561, the vice regal court of Los Reyes (now Lima), Peru, heard testimony from the town of Xauxa, listing the items that the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his soldiers had taken or looted from the Inca imperial storehouses. The list was read not from a manuscript or a tablet, but from a bundle of knotted strings called a khipu, which the Incas used for a wide variety of record-keeping, from the state census to the genealogies of Inca kings.

On May 2, 2006, a giant facsimile of a segment of the Xauxa khipu was unveiled at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ...

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