[1] She is best known for her work studying khipus and hybrid khipu-alphabetic texts in the Central Andes and is credited with the first potential phonetic decipherment of an element of a khipu.

[4][5][6][7] In 2011, National Geographic filmed a documentary about her research on khipu boards as part of their series Ancient X-Files.

She grew up in Dryden, New York, near Cornell University where her father, Joseph Kearns Campbell, was a Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering.

[4] Hyland received her first degree in Anthropology from Cornell in 1986, graduating magna cum laude with distinction and Phi Beta Kappa.

She earned a PhD in Anthropology from Yale University in 1994, where she was supervised by Richard Burger and also studied under Mike Coe and John Middleton.

[1] In 2012, Sabine Hyland was appointed as a Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, later promoted to Professor in 2018.

[7] This revelation was the first potential decipherment of an element in a khipu since Leslie Leland Locke decoded how khipus recorded numbers in 1923.

[1] The work of Hyland and other researchers to decipher the khipus has been compared to a search for an Inca "Rosetta Stone" and seeks to reframe the question of whether indigenous American societies other than the Mayans had writing systems, and what it means to have a "three-dimensional writing system" recorded through textile.