First, upon the arrival of the Spanish, during the first 100
years many forms of the previous cultures were burnt or eliminated
as was the case in Mesoamerica. However, by the 1600's Jesuit
priests began writing down cultural points from the Incan period
that were previously thought to be unimportant.
In 1604 and 1608 Jesuits wrote down a language from the area that
we now know as Bolivia, the Aymara, a group that is 1,000,000
strong today. Aymarans were associated with the Inca, often
reported to form a class of Incan priest. A complete vocabulary
and syntax (interestingly trivalent) was written down by the
Jesuits, in a manner that when a late 1980's effort to create a
written language for the Aymara, the older records were very useful.
Second, all that we have as hard evidence of pre-Columbian writing
from the Incan world is left by 80 quipu's, now recorded and stored
at the Univ. of Michigan. Marcia Ascher spent a great deal of time
trying to read these quipus, mathematically and linguistically.
She used one local Peruvian language as a bi-lingual text and failed.
I am sorry to report that Aymaran and its relatively easy grammar
(adding yes, no and maybe as a suffix) was not used as a possible
bi-lingual text by Ascher. One day I hope that someone makes that
effort; and decodes quipu writing, as all quipu contents continue
to amaze historians.
Third, the oldest known writing in Mesomerica is the La Mojarra
Stone, dating only to 300 AD. On that stone is a writing form that
differs from Mayan syntax and grammar. About 10% of the writing
appears to be tri-valent, as the Aymara used.
Could it be that there was trade between the Mesoamericans and Peru
area, very early, such that the Maya and Moche (a pre-Incan culture)
shared their writing skills. If so, which one came first?
At this time, no one knows, for sure. Only guess work guides the
anthropologists, archaeologists, linguistics, and much of the
ethnomathematical community concerning the dates, and the places
that writing were 'first' instituted in America.
Milo Gardner
Sacramento, Calif.