Picking up the quipu belatedly

A quick note on the quipu: apparently its informational nature wasn't known by westerners until very, very recently.  From a good review of 1491:

despite many clues in post-conquest sources (often written by Spanish colonial leaders or clergy), scholars only realized in the late 1990s that the bunches of intricately knotted strings produced by the Inka actually represent a writing system yielding three-dimensional written texts. The first systematic analysis of the grammar of the khipu code did not appear until 2003. As the Western Michigan University historian Catherine Julien explains, the chance now exists that we “may be able to hear the Inkas for the first time in their own voice.”