Gary Urton is the Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian Studies at Harvard University. He was previously Professor of Anthropology at Colgate University from 1978 to 2001. Dr. Urton is a specialist in Andean archaeology, particularly the quipu(khipu) numerical recording system used in the Inca empire in the 15th and 16th centuries. He is the most prominent advocate of the theory that the quipus encode linguistic as well as numerical information. From 2001 to 2005 he was a MacArthur Fellow.

Urton's work is scholarly and painstakingly thorough and is a valuable contribution to our understanding of Inca inscription that makes good use of ethnographic and ethnohistorical work on the Andean region. (Maggie Bolton, University of Manchester The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2006-03-00)

This is by far the most important monograph on Andean systems of information registry since the Ashers’ volumes in the late 1970s. Urton provides a platform for a whole new generation of studies. (Frank Salomon, Professor of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin–Madison)