sixth-light:

dramyhsturgis:

We thought the Incas couldn’t write. These knots change everything

Now two anthropologists are closing in on the Inca equivalent of the Rosetta stone. That could finally crack the code and transform our understanding of a civilisation whose history has so far been told only through the eyes of the Europeans who sought to eviscerate it.

If you’re thinking ‘that’s a dumb headline, we’ve know this for a while’ then a) you are right and b) this is in fact a very good article which explains how archaeologists have moved from knowing information is encoded to possibly being able to translate it, via the ancient but surprisingly little-used method of Asking The Descendants Of The People Who Made The Thing.