Review: Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape

Both volumes under consideration here focus on the nature of pre-Columbian systems of non-oral information transfer—what sometimes falls under the term “writing” but often exists outside that definition. How to classify and frame these systems and their modes of operation, as well as their relationship with alphabetic writing, has remained a sticky question in pre-Columbian studies. Galen Brokaw’s History of the Khipu is a focused study of how khipu (knotted-string devices) functioned in Inka culture before and after the Spanish invasion. Their Way of Writing is the fruit of a Dumbarton Oaks conference and reflects the wide-ranging scope of a meeting intended to consider information systems across a broad swath of Latin America. The book is geographically organized between Mesoamerican and Andean sections.