To the modern eye, it’s just a tangle of knotted cords. A manojo of alpaca and cotton threads, colorful and complex, but ultimately primitive. An artifact for a museum display case. The official story we were all taught is that the quipu was a mnemonic device, a kind of three-dimensional Andean abacus used for tracking...Read More

A traveler’s mind often makes a direct leap: Peru is Machu Picchu. It has become the final destination, the icon that eclipses almost everything else in the collective imagination. But that is just the end of the chapter. It’s not the whole book. Before a single foot steps into the elevated citadel, there is a...Read More