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The Lettered Mountain should surprise many readers. Frank Salomon and Mercedes Nino-Murcia's arguments concerning the passage from khipu to alphabetic literacy and the deep roots of alphabetic writing in rural Peru challenge traditional ethnographic portraits of Andean culture as exclusively oral. Their case for refocusing our attention away from schooled literacy and toward forms of legal literacy whose origins go back to the colonial period is backed by insightful ethnography. The Lettered Mountain forces us to see the Andes in a new light, without losing sight of the themes that were important to Andeanists in the past Joanne Rappaport, co-author of Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Alphabetic Literacy and Visuality in the Northern Andes, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries Frank Salomon and Mercedes Nino-Murcia's The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village's Way with Writing is destined to become a classic. It is a work that emerges onto the scene of today's contentious world of literacy studies as the most recent descendant of an esteemed Andean lineage. At the founding of that lineage are local cord-keepers in the central highlands of Peru, during the time of the Inka Empire, to lettered natives of the colonial state, such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and the local authors of the Huarochiri Manuscript, to generations of literate comuneros in the highland village of Tupicocha, where this study is set. The Lettered Mountain traces the deep and rich history of writing and text production over this long period, although it focuses on the present-day, in a work that will transform our understanding of the nature, implications and the consequences of literacy in communities that have, until now, been assumed to be outside the realm of the 'lettered.' A fascinating and highly stimulating read! Gary Urton, Harvard University

Frank Salomon and Mercedes Nino-Murcia's The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village's Way with Writing is destined to become a classic. It is a work that emerges onto the scene of today's contentious world of literacy studies as the most recent descendant of an esteemed Andean lineage. At the founding of that lineage are local cord-keepers in the central highlands of Peru, during the time of the Inka Empire, to lettered natives of the colonial state, such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and the local authors of the Huarochiri Manuscript, to generations of literate comuneros in the highland village of Tupicocha, where this study is set. The Lettered Mountain traces the deep and rich history of writing and text production over this long period, although it focuses on the present-day, in a work that will transform our understanding of the nature, implications and the consequences of literacy in communities that have, until now, been assumed to be outside the realm of the 'lettered.

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Frank Salomon is the John V. Murra Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village, also published by Duke University Press. Mercedes Niño-Murcia is Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Associate Director of the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Iowa. She is a co-editor of Bilingualism and Identity: Spanish at the Crossroads with Other Languages.

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