Americas pre-Columbian and contact-era records

Most lost-writing stories in this collection involve centuries of slow decay. This one has an exact date. In 1562, Bishop Diego de Landa ordered the burning of Maya sacred books, an act of destruction so thorough that only four of those folded bark-paper screenfolds survive anywhere today. The pre-contact Americas recorded information in forms the Old World simply never developed: knotted, colour-coded cords called khipu in the Andes, painted Mesoamerican screenfolds, and, carved onto Maya monuments and ceramics, one of only a few writing systems ever invented completely independently elsewhere on Earth. What is left of all this mostly reaches us secondhand, filtered through colonial transcriptions, hybrid pictorial versions redrawn by outsiders, and conquest-era chronicles -- which is why the conjectures gathered here have to weigh inscriptions, khipu structure, and openly hostile colonial sources against one another rather than trusting any single account.

Maya continued fractions and Desynchronized stelae both look for hidden numerical structure in how Maya monuments record calendar dates, including places where dedication dates appear to drift out of synchrony ahead of known political stress. LiDAR rank-size politics combines LiDAR-mapped settlement sizes with the political geography implied by inscriptions to test a rank-size law for Maya polities, and Khipu redundancy asks how much genuine information a khipu's knots and colour-coding can carry, treating built-in redundancy as an engineering choice rather than decoration. Six Sigma at Cuzco applies a modern quality-control statistic to Inca administrative uniformity at Cuzco.