Dumbarton Oaks is thrilled to announce that Professor Gary Urton has joined the incoming Fellows as Dumbarton Oaks Professor in Residence for the fall term. His time here is also supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Professor Urton is the Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian Studies and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, and his association with Dumbarton Oaks has been long and fruitful. He has served two terms as Senior Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies, from 1994 to 2000 and from 2004 to the present.
Professor Urton’s research focuses on various topics in pre-Hispanic and early colonial intellectual history in the Andes, and draws on materials and methods in archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnology. During his time as Dumbarton Oaks Professor in Residence, he will continue to pursue his work on Andean khipus, the knotted string recording devices that have fascinated him since the early nineties. The khipus were also the subject of a public lecture that Professor Urton gave at Dumbarton Oaks in the fall of 2013, entitled “To Write or Knot: Recent Advances in the Study of Andean Knotted Cord Records.”
Professor Urton is the founder and director of the Khipu Database Project at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted String Records (2003), Inca Myths (1999), The Social Life of Numbers: A Quechua Ontology of Numbers and Philosophy of Arithmetic (1997), and “The Khipus of Laguna de los Cóndores,” in Chachapoya Textiles: The Laguna de los Cóndores Textiles in the Museo Leymebamba, Chachapoyas, Peru (2007).