Artifact analysis

Not every civilization left behind piles of written documents -- the Inca had no alphabetic writing at all, and much of what we know about the Maya and Aztec comes from a mix of their own inscriptions and later, sometimes biased, accounts written after Spanish conquest. When written sources are scarce or unreliable, historians and archaeologists lean even more heavily on artifacts: objects that survive from the past and can be examined directly, like tools, pottery, buildings, and the quipu you studied in week 15.

Reading an artifact is its own skill, related to but different from reading a written primary source (week 7). A historian asks: What is this made of, and does that material occur naturally nearby? What skill or technology did making it require? Where exactly was it found, and what was found near it? And what does its design suggest about how it was used? A quipu's knots, positions, and colors encode real information once you know the system -- proving that "no alphabet" does not mean "no record." Every artifact is a kind of frozen decision, made by a real person solving a real problem, and careful analysis can recover some of that decision even without a single written word.