The Inca Empire managed vast territories without a written alphabet, relying instead on a mysterious system of knotted strings known as the khipu. Once dismissed as simple accounting tools, new ...

In 2013 and 2014, for instance, archaeologists excavated an Inca storehouse and found several khipus alongside caches of peanuts and chili peppers; a 2015 paper argued that the cords helped track ...

The burial belonged to a child who may have lived among fishermen from the Chancay culture, which thrived in Peru before the rise of the Inca Empire ...

Utility workers in Lima, Peru, recently uncovered a 1,000-year-old mummy predating the Inca Empire. The mummy likely belongs to the Chancay culture that existed from 1000 to 1470 A.D ...

The Atlantic has a fascinating deep dive into khipus — long cords that the Inca tied knots into to preserve information. Few know how to read the knots, which are hundreds of years old and ...

Object Details Author Koch, Peter O. 1953- Contents A fire that burns deep -- In search of Birú -- A second chance -- A test of will -- Inca heritage -- The empire of the sun -- Return of the ...

Object Details Author Bauer, Brian S Dearborn, David S. P (David Simon Paul) 1949- Contents 1. The Inca and the Sky -- 2. Historical Accounts Concerning Inca Solar Astronomy and the Year -- 3. The ...

In the mid- to late-16th century, the Inca empire—weakened by internal strife— fell to the rule of invading Spanish colonizers. The Inca left no written records of their underground ...

Nestled on a mountain ridge in the Urubamba Valley, Machu Picchu was built as a palace that was part of a larger royal estate belonging to the Inca emperor Pachacuti (reigned ca. 1420–1472).

Although keen on decipherment, Hyland admits that Inca khipus might represent more of a “proto–writing system” still coming into being when the Spanish invasion disrupted its development.