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historical assumptions and hypothetical formulations, seem a reasonable price to pay for the possibility of interpreting extant khipu specimens in social, political and religious contexts, re-embedding them, sometimes for the first time in centuries, in their original historical setting. This is no small feat, one that, until recently, seemed virtually impossible with the available evidence. Of particular interest is Urton’s methodology, which correlates published early colonial-era censuses to extant specimens. Based on the distribution of the range and frequency of unit groupings (families/households) recorded in these colonial censuses, Urton elaborates a series of hypothetical khipu exemplars, which he then compares to the larger database, identifying 50–60 possible khipu analogues that share these features. This is a remarkable finding. Althoughmultiple sources identify census-recording as one of the main functions of khipu (if not the capital one), no census khipu—with the likely exception of khipu UR6 from Chachapoyas—has yet been positively identified. A large number of censuses and tributary rolls (padrones), conducted by both civil and ecclesiastic inspectors and stored in colonial archives, await the type of painstaking analysis pioneered by Urton. Equally important is Urton’s proposed identification of the Santa Valley ‘khipu archive’, a group of six interrelated specimens looted from an unknown location on the north-central coast and then acquired by khipu scholar Carlo Radicati, with a tribute reassessment (visita) carried out in the village of Recuay in 1670. Urton posits a possible match between, on the on the hand, the alphabetic record of tributaries (organized by ayllu/pachaca) and their tribute dues in specie, and, on the other, the numerical values recorded in the knotted strings of Radicati’s collection. Although Urton acknowledges that certain problems arise with the identification of the khipu with this particular location (the ‘Santa Valley’), if his correlation were correct, it would be the first known ‘match’ ever between an alphabetical document and its corresponding khipu transcription. Such a match would grant the Santa Valley cords the status of a ‘Rosetta Khipu’. In this section of the book, as well as in others, Urton argues convincingly that khipu structural and formatting features, such as cord grouping, colour coding, cord attachment type and knot direction, signalled ayllu/pachaca affiliation. Thus, each of the six khipu can be read as a record of tributary obligations owed by each of the pachaca (unit of 100 tributaries) of Recuay. Interestingly, Urton finds that, although the Recuay visita stated that each tributary was to pay close to 3 pesos, values recorded in the cords which, in his interpretation, likely referred to specie paid per tributary vary from 0 to 13. Urton offers a clever solution: while the written tribute assessment (tasa) recorded the theoretical contribution of each tributary (an equal share of the total for the repartimiento or fiscal district), khipus were internal records meant to aid local khipukamayoq in keeping track of these individual payments. Therefore, they encoded the actual contributions of tributaries of disparate wealth and status. While Urton’s hypothesis of divergent contributions captured in khipu is suggestive—colonial-era historians have offered copious examples of social differentiation and class conflict within indigenous communities—it remains to be empirically proven. While I agree that knotted cords recorded types of information that were only internally relevant (i.e., meaningful to communal tax collectors and administrators, but not necessarily to Spanish officials and priests), Urton’s analysis offers little in the form of historical context to assess whether such wide distinctions of wealth had emerged in Recuay or the Santa Valley around 1670 and why. Only a few among the privileged cacique (noble) class could have been able to afford 13 pesos worth of annual tribute (let alone an equivalent amount every six months) and caciques were, de jure and de facto, exempt from these fiscal burdens. Another possible explanation for the 0–13 range variation would be that it reflected some other arithmetical operation resulting from converting tribute owed in specie to its monetary equivalent. Anthropologist and khipu scholar Frank Salomon wrote in 2004 that the literature on khipu resembled ‘a bridge half-built from two piers’, with elaborate khipu specimens on one side and, on the other, testimonies about Andean domains of activity or thought said to have been encoded in cords (Salomon 2004, 18). Urton’s carefully attained matches between khipus and alphabetic accounts, along with the many other findings revealed in this work, are starting to fill the seemingly unsurmountable gap between the two sides. This book will herald a new era in khipu studies.