Manuel “Manny” Medrano (U.S.A.) was an Economics student at Harvard when he deciphered an accounting system based on knots, called quipus, used by the Inca Empire to take accounts and store information. Medrano is now a researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he continues to analyse archaeological, historical and ethnographical information in order to learn more about the pre-Hispanic world through this language that reveals so much about the socioeconomic transformations undergone by the indigenous Peruvians with the arrival of the conquest and the subsequent colonization of American territory. Medrano writes about his findings in his new book Quipus. Mil años de historia anudada en los Andes y su futuro digital (2021). In conversation with the Peruvian archaeologist Ulla Holmquist.