Ancient America to the Singularity

A quipu from the Museo Larco in Lima, spread in a fan on a black ground: hundreds of knotted cords of ochre, cream, and gray-blue hanging from a main cord

Photograph: Museo Larco, Lima, released under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons (File:Inca Quipu.jpg, uploaded by Lyndsayruell, 2007); contrast adjusted. The photographer’s name is not recorded.

Map of the Terrain

— the quipu —

The People's Share · A GED Social Studies Series

Who made this?

1. Who made it?
The quipu: record keepers in the Andes, under the Inca state. Their names are not recorded. The photograph: someone working for the Museo Larco in Lima, which released the picture for free use in 2007. The museum’s record does not name the photographer either. The file’s page on Wikimedia Commons names two people, and both of them only moved the file from one website to another. That is worth noticing: the record names the movers and not the makers.
2. When, and where?
The museum dates this quipu to about 1400. Which valley it came from is not recorded. Quipu were made in the Andes mountains and along the Pacific coast of what is now Peru, with others in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile. A quipu is a main cord of cotton or llama and alpaca fiber, with hanging cords tied to it, and knots tied in the hanging cords. The place of a knot on its cord and the kind of knot it is tell the number. Most surviving quipu were made under the Inca state, between about 1400 and 1532, but knotted-cord records in the Andes are older than the Inca; the Wari people made them between about 600 and 1000.
3. Why, and for whom?
To keep records for the state: counts of people, goods in storehouses, and labor owed. Spanish writers in the 1500s also said that quipu held histories and songs. Whether that is so, no one today can read well enough to say.
4. Who has it now, and how did it get there?
This one is in Lima, at the Museo Larco, a private museum founded in 1926 by Rafael Larco Hoyle, whose family collected and bought tens of thousands of objects from Peru’s coast. It has not left Peru. Most surviving quipu have: they are in museums and private collections in Europe and the United States, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York. How many survive depends on who is counting and when: the Smithsonian said about 600 in 2011, and a researcher writing in 2025 counted about 1,600. Many of the ones in museums came from burial sites on Peru’s dry coast, where cord and cloth last, collected in the 1800s and 1900s and then sold or given to museums.
5. Whose voice is missing here, and where can we hear it?
The record keepers who tied the knots. No one can read a quipu in full today, and the Spanish burned many. But the cords did not fall silent everywhere. Villagers in San Juan de Collata, in the highlands above Lima, kept two quipu as community records into modern times, and Quechua herders still keep counts with knotted cords.

For your notebook: this quipu stayed in Peru, in a museum a family built from what it collected. Most of the others did not stay. Who should decide where a record lives?

Sources: Wikimedia Commons, “File:Inca Quipu.jpg” (Museo Larco, Lima); Museo Larco; Smithsonian Institution, “Quipu” (2011); Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Quipu”; The Conversation, on khipu research (2025); World History Encyclopedia, “Quipu” (2014).

What this is

This is the map of a quiz series for the GED Social Studies test. It has seventy-two topics in seven groups. Each number is one quiz, and a number never changes, so you can always find your way back to a topic.

The series is named for its span. It begins with the peoples who built cities in the Americas thousands of years ago, and it runs to the edge of the present, where machines that read and write are changing work, law, and the news. “The Singularity” is a name some people give to a point, real or imagined, where machine intelligence outruns ours and change outruns prediction. This series makes no promise that such a point will come. The word marks the direction of the road, the way “Ancient America” marks where the road begins, and both names are worth arguing with. Quiz 4 teaches that every timeline has a starting point somebody chose; this title is a timeline, and you are on it.

The first six groups cover what the test asks. The seventh group, Ancient America, is not on the test. It is on this map anyway. The peoples who built cities in the Americas before 1492 are part of the history the test leaves out, and many of us in this class descend from them.

One word needs care. "Ancient" here names the time before 1492. It does not describe the peoples. The Haudenosaunee, the Lenape, the Maya, the Quechua, and the descendants of the Taíno are living nations, and some of their members live in New York today.

Built so far: this map.

What the test is like

Checked against GED Testing Service, ged.com, August 2026.

A word about order

The numbers are addresses, not a line to walk in order. We begin with the Toolkit, Quizzes 1 to 10, two at a time, because every other quiz uses those ten skills. The Toolkit quizzes practice on material from Ancient America, so the seventh group is present from the first page.

After the Toolkit, quizzes come in pairs: one from the test's side of the map and one from Ancient America, until the seventh group is done. Then the test's groups, two at a time, with more from civics, because civics is half the test. Every few quizzes there is an interlude: something to read whole, with nothing to score.

Interludes so far: Interlude I · The Author Walks (Guaman Poma, 1615). Also unscored: The Quipu Machine, where you read Inca cords to a number and tie the knots yourself; it belongs to Quiz 10.

Built with its readers

Every quiz in this series ends with four questions for the person who just took it, because the reader who almost picked B is the world’s expert on why B tempts. When a reader’s note changes a page, the change is recorded here and on the page itself, credited the way the reader chooses — first name, class, or not at all.

August 2026 — the first question of the project, “which passage below, and where is it?”, rebuilt the worked examples of Quizzes 3, 5, and 7 to carry their own stimuli. That rule now binds every quiz to come.

August 2026 — the first reader to arrive by the front door found that the Map lit its finished quizzes but had never linked them. Found in deployment; now every lit topic is a door.

August 2026 — six masthead drawings arrived blank on the live site while every photograph survived; the drawings’ ink-texture effect did not make the trip from file to server. The drawings now travel as pictures, the way the photographs do. Found in deployment.

August 2026 — the editor asked whether the picture beside Quiz 8’s two accounts belonged there. It did not: on a second look it shows the festival’s own rite, not the 1520 attack, and a mislabeled picture teaches backwards. Removed. Found in review.

Numbers in yellow are quizzes already built. The rest are coming.

I. The Toolkit

Ten skills the whole test runs on.

  1. 1Reading a social studies passage
  2. 2Primary and secondary sources: who made it, and why
  3. 3Reading maps
  4. 4Timelines and dates
  5. 5Tables, graphs, and charts
  6. 6Political cartoons and pictures as arguments
  7. 7Cause and effect
  8. 8Point of view, purpose, and bias
  9. 9Weighing evidence and reasoning
  10. 10Numbers in social studies: percents, rates, averages

II. Foundations of American Government

Half the test is civics. It starts here.

  1. 11What government is for, and the kinds there are
  2. 12The ideas behind the Constitution
  3. 13Founding documents I: Magna Carta, Mayflower Compact, Declaration of Independence
  4. 14Founding documents II: Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, the Federalist debate
  5. 15The Constitution's principles: separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism
  6. 16Congress, and how a bill becomes law
  7. 17The president and the executive branch
  8. 18The courts and judicial review
  9. 19Federalism in practice: Washington, Albany, City Hall
  10. 20Amending the Constitution

III. Rights, Citizens, and Politics

The other half of civics: what the government owes you, and how you take part.

  1. 21The First Amendment
  2. 22Amendments 2 to 10
  3. 23The Fourteenth Amendment: citizenship and equal protection
  4. 24Citizenship: rights and responsibilities
  5. 25Voting: who could, and when
  6. 26Presidential elections and the Electoral College
  7. 27Parties, interest groups, campaigns, and money
  8. 28The media and public opinion
  9. 29Public policy: how a decision gets made (housing in New York)
  10. 30Landmark Supreme Court cases

IV. United States History

One fifth of the test. The story the civics and economics quizzes hang on.

  1. 31The Americas before 1492
  2. 32Contact and colonization
  3. 33Colonial society
  4. 34The Revolution
  5. 35The early republic
  6. 36Expansion and its costs
  7. 37Slavery, sectionalism, and the road to war
  8. 38The Civil War
  9. 39Reconstruction and its undoing
  10. 40Industry, immigration, and labor
  11. 41The United States as a world power
  12. 42The 1920s, the Depression, and the New Deal
  13. 43World War II
  14. 44The Cold War
  15. 45The Civil Rights Movement, and the movements that followed
  16. 46Since 1970: Watergate to 9/11 and after

V. Economics

About one sixth of the test. Money, work, and who gets what.

  1. 47The basic ideas: scarcity, choice, incentives, trade
  2. 48Supply and demand
  3. 49Markets and their limits
  4. 50Money, banks, and the Federal Reserve
  5. 51Measuring the economy: GDP, unemployment, taxes, budgets
  6. 52Economic systems and political freedom
  7. 53Economic history: mercantilism to globalization
  8. 54Consumer economics: paychecks, credit, rent
  9. 55Labor and ownership: wages, unions, who owns what

VI. Geography and the World

About one sixth of the test. Where people live, and why they move.

  1. 56Reading the world: continents, oceans, climate, regions
  2. 57Classical civilizations of Africa, Asia, and Europe
  3. 58Classical civilizations of the Americas, compared
  4. 59Environment and society
  5. 60Borders
  6. 61Human migration

VII. Ancient America

Not on the test. On the map anyway.

  1. 62The first peoples: how and when people came to the Americas
  2. 63Maize and the first farmers
  3. 64The Olmec
  4. 65The Maya
  5. 66Central Mexico after the Olmec: Teotihuacan, Monte Albán, the Toltec
  6. 67The Mexica (Aztec) and Tenochtitlan
  7. 68The Andes before the Inca: Caral to Chimú
  8. 69The Inca
  9. 70North America: mound builders, Ancestral Puebloans, the Haudenosaunee, the Lenape
  10. 71The Caribbean: the Taíno and Kalinago
  11. 72How we know: archaeology, codices, oral tradition, and who tells the story

How a quiz page works

Each quiz opens with an object made by the peoples of the Americas before 1492, and under it the card you saw at the top of this page, "Who made this?" Then comes the idea, explained once in plain words. Then a worked example, thinking out loud, including one wrong turn a careful reader might take. Part A is the skill by itself, on short material. Part B is the skill on a real passage with a map, chart, table, or picture, the way the test gives it.

Check your answers when you are done. The key tells you the answer, and it also tells you why the tempting wrong answers tempt, so you can name the trap next time. Every page prints clean in black and white.

The card on every page

Every picture and every quoted source in this series gets the same five questions:

The test asks the first three of these about sources in its own way; Quizzes 2, 8, and 9 practice them. The last two are ours. When an answer is not known, the card says so, because "we do not know" is a true answer and a useful one. Each card ends with one line for your notebook: a question with no key.