A Personal History of Knot Knowing

Abstract

T he continent of South America occupies a unique position globally when it comes to the matter of “knowing,” at least with respect to indigenous expressions of knowledge. Sometimes referred to as “the least known continent,” South America stands alone as the only continent (excluding Antarctica) on which no civilization invented a system of writing during the long time span from the peopling of the continent (ca. 13,000 BCE) to the arrival of Europeans, in the 1530s CE. That said, the Inkas did develop a system of record-keeping, using knotted strings—the subject of the discussion following this paragraph. Because of the absence of written documents from before the European invasion, we do not know, from indigenous pre-Columbian testimony, the identity of a single individual who lived on the continent before Europeans began recording information, soon after their conquest of the Inka empire. While we can with fair certainty establish the age, sex (but not gender), diet, and so on, of people who lived before the conquest, for no set of skeletal remains from anywhere on the continent do we have an indigenously recorded name to match those remains. No event