(This was the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition, and the church was making a major push to convert natives from their pantheistic state religion.) By the middle of the 17 th century, Spanish accounts, the only historical sources available from that time, began to cast doubt on the idea that the khipus had ever been “read” like texts. The Spaniards’ institutional response to this singular accounting system, originally benign, shifted in 1583, when Peru’s nascent Roman Catholic church decreed that khipus were the devil’s work and ordered the destruction of every khipu in the former Inca empire. For many years during the 16 th century, says Frank Salomon, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Inca khipucamayocs and Spanish accountants would square off in court during lawsuits, with the khipu numbers usually deemed more accurate. The Spaniards, who were no slouches themselves in the bureaucracy department-Pizarro’s landing party included 12 notaries-observed that the Incas were remarkably skilled with numbers. The great 16 th-century Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de León recalled that these men were so skilled that “not even a pair of sandals” escaped their annual tallies. To keep track of all this stuff, the empire employed khipucamayocs, a specially trained caste of khipu readers.

Years’ worth of food and textiles were carefully stockpiled in storehouses. When a battalion of Spanish conquistadors, led by the ruthless Francisco Pizarro, arrived in 1532, the invaders were awed by the Inca state’s organization. No one disputes that the Incas were great collectors of information.

Mark adams machu picchu