Writing and other technologies for enhancing human memory and the reach of communication seem, in many instances in the ancient world, to have a special relationship with the rise of ancient urban centers. This chapter compares the diverse instances, in which writing and other forms of record-keeping developed apparently in close coordination with burgeoning cities. The functions to which information technologies were put in early cities run the gamut from economic administration to the performance and commemoration of ritual. One important function of the khipu at Cuzco and other Inka cities and administrative centers is that the technology also served as proof of the official's fulfilment of his duty to execute and document the administrative task so ordered by his superior. In Mesopotamia, pre-writing systems such as different kinds of seals, tokens, and their combinations were already complex enough to require established methods to transfer them, along with other skills, like measuring fields or performing mathematics.

A long history of incipient urbanism in the southern Andes produced Tiwanaku, and yet, in turn, urban centrality transformed the southern Andes. This chapter focuses on two critical aspects of Tiwanaku's emergent centrality. Khonkho Wankane and Tiwanaku were sparsely inhabited centers of recurring periodic gathering and ritual activity. The chapter explores the origins of southern Andean urbanism. Tiwanaku emerged as a city between 500 and 600 CE in the Andean altiplano or high plateau. Tiwanaku thrived as an urban center during the Andean Middle Horizon. Next, the chapter discusses Tiwanaku's urban origins by explicating the recently investigated Late Formative site of Khonkho Wankane and emphasizing its distributed proto-urbanism as Tiwanaku's precursor and producer. Finally, it discusses the reason people came to these centers to begin with, focusing on the importance of cyclical social gatherings at built landscapes that facilitated proximity to ancestral monolithic personages.