Letter: Did I infect this Andean culture with knots?

From Eleanor Sharman, Dorrigo, New South Wales, Australia

I was fascinated and somewhat relieved to read of the possibility that the Incas' knotted khipu express a language (29 September, p 33). In Bolivia in 1988, a fellow backpacker taught me the craft of making bracelets from colourful knotted threads, called pulsera.

I had never seen them before, and neither had the Quechua-speaking women I travelled alongside on buses and trains along the Andes. I gave my bag of threads to a young girl from the family I was staying with, in a mud brick and thatch cottage on the island of Amantani in Lake Titicaca. Apparently, locally made pulseras were for sale in the area not long after.

Ever since, I have been concerned that I might have unintentionally triggered this disruption to the making and selling of their traditional loom-woven belts and bags, which carry meaningful designs of their own.