Embargoed for Release
11:30 p.m. (EDT)
Tuesday, June 13, 2000
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT
Sarah Jarvis 315 228-7452
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GARY URTON, PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT COLGATE UNIVERSITY, AWARDED MACARTHUR FELLOWSHIP
Hamilton, NY--Gary Urton, professor of anthropology at Colgate University, is one of 25 individuals selected to be a MacArthur Fellow by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in Chicago. Along with the recognition that accompanies this remarkable honor, all MacArthur fellows will receive a "no-strings-attached" grant of $500,000 over five years.
For the past 30 years, Urton has studied and written about the language, astronomy and systems of numbers associated with the prehistoric culture of the Incas. According to the MacArthur Foundation, "{Urton's} inquiries always concern non-Western knowledge and the beauty and complexity of its organization as manifested through visual form. As such, his work provides new perspectives on human intelligence and illuminates different ways of thinking about and organizing the world....He has consistently made connections that others have been unable to see, and through imaginative and groundbreaking work has made a succession of new discoveries."
The flexibility and freedom the $500,000 stipend provides has the potential of bringing Urton closer to making his most significant scholarly discovery to date. Urton has been working to "crack the code" of the quipu ["kee-pu'], an ancient system of dyed, intricately knotted strings that the Incas used to record their history, environment and culture. Although it appears to look more like a mop's head, the quipu beautifully holds the narratives, genealogy, symbols, phenomena and quantitative measurements of ancient Incan life, all neatly, and, to-date silently, knotted along each strand.
Most recently, 32 perfectly preserved quipus were found in some craggy cliffs over looking a lake in northeastern Peru, near the town of Leymebamba. Urton hopes that by studying the quipus found in Leymebamba, and searching for records made by Spaniards (who conquered the natives in that area), he will discover a written document whose information corresponds to patterns and numerical values preserved in the knots and colors of the Leymebamba quipus. It will be the first such connection to be made between the quipus and that of a written language. Such a correspondence would also provide a rare and inspirational insight into a civilization where no other systematic record has been found. It would also be an important step in beginning to unravel a so-far unbreakable code made from string.
Urton has approached this textile mystery in an ingenious way. He has become fluent in Quechua, the language used by the Incas, an expert on Incan mathematics, and has studied the symbolic meaning of colors and the intrinsic mathematics and patterns associated with textile weaving in the Andes region.
Throughout the majority of this preparation, since 1978, Urton has taught at Colgate University, and has served as director of the Division of Social Sciences since 1995. He is the author of many journal articles and books, most notably At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky: An Andean Cosmology (1981), The History of a Myth: Pacariqtambo and the Origin of the Inkas (1990), and The Social Life of Numbers: A Quechua Ontology of Numbers and Philosophy of Arithmatic. He received an Organization of American States Fellowship (1976), several National Science Foundation grants (1981, 1982, and 1993), and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1994).
While there are no quotas or limits, typically between 20 and 40 MacArthur Fellows are selected each year. Including today's group, a total of 588 Fellows, ranging in age from 18 to 82, have been named since the program began in 1981.
Founded in 1819, Colgate University is a nationally ranked, highly selective, residential, liberal arts college enrolling nearly 2,750 undergraduates. Situated on a rolling 515-acre campus in central New York State, Colgate University attracts motivated students with diverse backgrounds, interests and talents from all over the United States.
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