Ph.D., Cornell University, 1978
John V. Murra Professor of Anthropology
At UW-Madison since 1982
Cultural Anthropology
Frank Salomon's current project is a detailed study of Rapaz, a community at 4000 meters over sea level, which guards some 263 khipus in a house of traditional ritual from which villagers serve the deified mountains. The project combines close study of these khipus with archaeological, ethnographic, and architectural study of their context. Khipu research bears on questions of "proto-writing," the origin and demise of scripts, and relations between semiosis (sign action) and social complexity.
Salomon teaches courses on the Andean peoples, on religion, on research design and methods, and on literacy.
The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village . Duke University Press, 2004. (Winner of the 2005 American Society for Ethnohistory Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize)
(with Stuart Schwartz, co-editor): Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. South America (Prehistory and Conquest). New York: Cambridge University Press, l999.
Los Yumbos, Niguas, y Tsatchila o "Colorados" durante la colonia española: Etnohistoria del Noroccidente de Pichincha . Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 1997.
(with George Urioste): The Huarochirí Manuscript, a Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion . Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991.
Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. (Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology, 59).
Office: 5442 Sewell Social Science Bldg.
Email address: fsalomon@wisc.edu
http://www.anthropology.wisc.edu/salomon/chaysimire/index.html "Huarochirí, a Peruvian Culture in Time"
http://www.anthropology.wisc.edu/salomon/Rapaz/index.html "The Khipu Patrimony of Rapaz, Peru"