gratuitously complicated
The language is academic in the bad sense of the word. Long, abstruse and snobbish construction of the sentences, and not so much theoretical meat. Ascher & Ascher's "Mathematics of the Incas: Code of the Quipu" is way better.
A work in progress gratefully received
The comments (above) by one of Dr. Urton's more renowned colleagues make clear what Urton himself says in his review below: that this is not meant to be the definitive answer on an extremely difficult and meaningful topic. The very idea (that needed championing by Somebody, ubiquitous as it is in the chronicles) that the khipukuna were more than simple numerical record-keepers is revolutionary to our understanding of Andean culture and-- more importantly-- to our appreciation of the vast diversity and creativity of human kind. It is stirring to think of the simple metaphorical qualities of a so-called writing system that involves the act of weaving elements together-- creation-- versus our unconscious sense of writing as marking something (i.e., making a mark, impressing into, imposing upon, etc.). This concept is a great entry point to understanding pristine Andean civilization and to really swallowing the fact that Andean society was and is so vastly different from our own in science, art, technology, and just plain Consciousness, period.
Though a recompilation of scattered information prevails throughout a large portion of the book, for the new-comer or simply for the lay person (like myself) who has little access to the wide range of journals and reviews from which information can be drawn, the plain fact of having all this data in one place is of great importance. Dr. Urton's suggestions for the future are also welcome starting points.
Now, everyone from mathematicians to code-breakers to ethnohistorians can easily jump on board this incredible ship of discovery and, if nothing else, challenge the inherent European prejudice and arrogance that for too long prevailed in the study of Andean culture. No small accomplishment indeed.
Truthfully, I write this review for selfish reasons as well, as I am trying to contact Dr. Urton, and think perhaps he will check in here some time. Until now it has been hard to do so, as I live in Cusco, Peru, studying on an amateur scale what Gary got his doctorate in. Thanks.
A rejoinder
As the author of this book, it is obviously inappropriate for me to assign a ranking to the book. However, I cannot post this "review," which is in fact a rejoinder to the one existing review without a rating; thus, I assign the book a high ranking (4 stars), as all things can be improved upon. The one existing review of my book so significantly distorts and misrepresents the contents of the book that a reply is in order. First, my theory does not assign seven yes/no aspects to each knot. Rather there are seven different binary decisions reflected in the construction of each knot, each decision of which has its own, unique contents and character (i.e., they're not yes/no; rather, they're right/left, over/under, etc.). Thus, my analogy to binary coding is just that, an analogy that is used to give the reader a general understanding of the type of system that is proposed. Second, some information may be shared by knots on the same string; these may be like species of a genus, and thus, we cannot, as the reviewer does, reject out of hand a system that contains some level of redundancy. Third (and related to point two), the reviewer suggests that we run these configurations off to see if the "resulting distributions are something that could actually be an informational representation." But who will determine what constitutes an actual informational representation in a system that we are, as yet, unable to read? Fourth, the reviewer states that I have not provided even one real example of a decoding. This is untrue; see the decoding of a Chachapoyas khipu provided on pp. 129-132 and in Table 5.1. And finally, the reviewer says that my notion that some (not "all" as he would have it) readings may have been performed by way of noting the pattern of decisions in contrasting colored stones is a "strange hypothesis." This is, however, precisely how this message was produced -- i.e., by a series of eight-bit , off/on signals that are converted into English language script. As I note in the book, what we lack in the coding of the khipu is an understanding of the way the coded information was translated into the message that was read off by the khipu reader. As clearly and repeatedly stated in the book, the theory of binary coding is put forward in this book in an attempt to find some new way(s) of working with these devices to move us to a new level of analysis and, hopefully, understanding.
Unfinished Research
I approached this book with anticipation, since it was widely touted as revealing the secrets of the Incan "binary" coding system. But it turns out Dr. Urton here is reporting on research which is essentially incomplete. There's no question that he is a stand-out as a quipu scolar, and that he has identified new aspects of how quipus are constructed -- in particular, how each pendant cord is attached to the primary cord ("recto" vs. "verso"). Unfortunately, he still has no answers to how quipus really recorded information, and even his hypotheses don't seem compelling.
The "binary" nature he claims for the quipu encoding scheme is based on seven yes/no aspects of each knot -- things like the material the cord is made from, its color, its attachment type, and the direction the knot is tied in. Seven bits gives you 128 possibilities, although Urton increases this to around 1500 based on subchoices for color. (He points out that this is approximately the same number of signs as in the Egyptian hieroglyphic system.) He compares this to ASCII, a system of 128 signs each also composed of seven binary bits.
But as a computer scientist, I have to quibble with this logic. Several of the bits of information are things that apply to an entire cord or even an entire quipu. So it's as if you were trying to write a story in ASCII, but on one line the third bit of every character had to be a "1". Doesn't make sense. Other of his "binary" variables are things which would seem much more likely to be customs of the locale, or accidents, although he denies this possibility. At a minimum, he nees to run actual quipu data through statistical analysis to validate that the resulting distributions are something that could actually be an informational representation -- my guess is that they would turn out not to be.
More basically, though, he needs to validate his theories and hypotheses with real decoding examples, of which he does not have a single one. It's like discussing an Egyptian tombstone covered with hieroglyphics and spending all your time on categorizing them by shape and size without being able to understand a single one. I know decoding quipus is a really, really hard problem, or it would have been done before, but I don't think it's worth writing a whole book just to talk about a few heretofore unremarked aspects of quipus and offer unsubstantiated hypotheses.
Urton notes the use in Incan society of systems of black and white stones, arranged in rectangular fashion. He hypothesizes that Incan quipu-camayo (quipu readers) read off the binary variables from each knot and created tableaus of stones where a row of seven would give the binary values, then were able to interpret the meaning from these stones. This is a really strange hypothesis. It's equivalent to imagining that people read English by converting each character into seven binary digits in their heads or on paper and then read the meaning off that huge list of 0's and 1's. No, they read the characters directly, and I strongly suspect the quipu-camayos read the knots directly as well.
Beyond the content, I have a minor quibble with the style. It's like Urton ran his text through an obfuscation machine to make all the sentences real long and academic sounding. He desperately needs an editor.
I wish Dr. Urton well with his research and hope he is the one who actually cracks the code. Meanwhile, if you are interested in quipus in general you are better off with the Ascher book on Mathematics of the Incas.
(4 reviews)
