Person:

Urton, Gary

Record keeping in the Inka Empire of the Andes of ancient Peru was based on the knotted-string recording device, the khipu (or quipu; Quechua: ‘knot'). Khipus were produced and consulted by Inka administrators for a variety of purposes, including the recording of censuses, tribute data, as well as life histories and genealogies of the Inka nobility. Cord-keepers were organized in a hierarchical arrangement of officials, from local khipukamayuqs (‘knot makers/organizers'), to higher-level officials who staffed provincial administrative centers, to state cord-keepers in the capital, Cusco. The khipu-keepers stored collections of khipus in regional centers and in Cusco where they could be consulted on a variety of matters of interest to the state. This study looks first at the way information was recorded on the knotted-cord records. This is followed by an overview of what we know to date about archival collections of khipus, including a close study of a colonial era khipu archive from the Santa Valley, on the north-central coast of Peru. Of particular note is the fact that many khipus were stored in burial chambers with ancestral mummies, a situation that left these records accessible to descendants of the ancestors, who visited the burial chambers where they paid tribute to the mummies and consulted the knot records.

This chapter explores an alternative proposal for the linguistic impact of Wari expansion: that it could in fact have been two-fold, dispersing both Quechua and Aymara simultaneously. To this end, it invokes the distinctive Andean institutions of ‘complementary asymmetric dualism’, to explore whether they might not have linguistic correlates too. Specifically, it looks to the wari–llaqwash dyadism between mid-altitude, maize-cultivating wari, hypothesized as speaking Quechua, and higher-altitude, camelid-herding llaqwash speaking Aymara.

In an article entitled “Western mathematics: The secret weapon of cultural imperialism,” the author argues that Western European colonizing societies of the 15th to 19th centuries were especially effective in imposing on subordinate populations the values of rationalism and “objectivism” – defined as a way of conceiving of the world as composed of discrete objects that could be abstracted from their contexts – primarily through “mathematico-technological cultural force” embedded in institutions relating to accounting, trade, administration, and education (Bishop, 1990).

What was the meaning, for Inca record keepers, of the knotted cord constructions they produced as administrative records for the Inca state? In particular, how did these administrators think about the knot constructions that (as we now understand) were used to sign numerical values? And what were the consequences for record keeping in the colonial Andes of the encounter between native cord keepers and the Spanish record keepers, with their numeral signs inscribed on parchment or paper? These are the questions that I explore in this paper. While we do not have explicit, first-hand testimony concerning the first two questions, there is a wealth of evidence relating to the interaction between native and European record keepers from the early years of the colony. The paper examines various contexts in which the cord keepers, who continued producing knotted-cord records long after the conquest, would have encountered written numerals and the implications of these encounters for questions of authority and legitimacy in the production of administrative records in the colonial Andes.

Accounts from the Spanish chronicles regarding Inka record-keeping practices by means of the knotted string devices called khipu ("knot") indicate that these accounts were compiled in a system of "checks and balances." Each community in the empire had a minimum of four khipu accountants, all of whom are said by the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega to have kept the same records. This study examines several examples of matching khipu accounts identified among sets of two or three khipu. The identification of matching khipu accounts has been facilitated by the recent development of a khipu database at Harvard University. It is argued that certain three-term numerical sequences recorded in one set of three matching khipu from Chachapoyas, northern Peru, represent a type of numerical signifier that may have served as identity labels of the information recorded in this set of khipu. The long-range objective of this research is to investigate the information recorded on khipu from various provenience zones around the former Inka Empire that may represent the remains of khipu archives. /// Relatos en las crónicas españolas relativas a la práctica Inka de mantenimiento de registros por medio de dispositivos de cordeles anudados denominados khipu ("nudo") indican que estos eran recopilados dentro de un sistema de "controles y balances." Cada comunidad en el imperio poseía un mínimo de cuatro "contadores" o registradores de khipu, todos los cuales, según relata cronista Garcilaso de la Vega, llevaban y mantenían los mismos registros. Este estudio examina diversos ejemplos afines y de concordancia compartida, identificados entre conjuntos de dos o tres ejemplares de khipu. La identificación de registros de khipu con afinidad y concordancia ha sido considerablemente facilitada por el reciente desarrollo de una base de datos en la Universidad de Harvard. Se plantea que ciertas secuencias numéricas de tres elementos registradas en un conjunto de tres khipus afines de Chachapoyas en el norte del Perú, representan un tipo de significador numérico que podrían haber fungido o desempeñado como rótulos de identidad de la información registrada en este conjunto de khipus. El objetivo a largo plazo de esta investigación es la de averiguar la información registrada en ejemplares de khipu de diversas zonas del antiguo Imperio Inka, que pudiesen representar los remanentes de archivos de khipu.

We present a critique of a paper written by two economists, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, which is forthcoming in the American Economic Review and which was uncritically highlighted in Science magazine. Their paper claims there is a causal effect of genetic diversity on economic success, positing that too much or too little genetic diversity constrains development. In particular, they argue that “the high degree of diversity among African populations and the low degree of diversity among Native American populations have been a detrimental force in the development of these regions.” We demonstrate that their argument is seriously flawed on both factual and methodological grounds. As economists and other social scientists begin exploring newly available genetic data, it is crucial to remember that nonexperts broadcasting bold claims on the basis of weak data and methods can have profoundly detrimental social and political effects.

Recording devices formed of knotted cords, known as khipus, are a well-known feature of imperial administration among the Inka of Andean South America. The origins and antecedents of this recording system are, however, much less clearly documented. Important insights into that ancestry are offered by a group of eight khipus dating from the later part of the Middle Horizon period (AD 600–1000), probably used by the pre-Inka Wari culture of the central Andes. This article reports the AMS dating of four of these early khipus. A feature of the Middle Horizon khipus is the clustering of knots in groups of five, suggesting that they were produced by a people with a base five number system. Later, Inka khipus were organised instead around a decimal place-value system. Hence the Inka appear to have encountered the base five khipus among Wari descendant communities late in the Middle Horizon or early in the Late Intermediate period (AD 1000–1450), subsequently adapting them to a decimal system.

Based on a close examination of Spanish translations and transcriptions of "readings" of Inka khipus (knotted-string recording devices) by native "knotkeepers/makers" during the sixteenth century, I make suggestions about the types of information that appear to have been recorded. While memory played an important role in the construction of full narrative renderings of the khipus, the transcriptions nonetheless suggest that the khipu signifiers contained a high level of syntactic and semantic information. It is argued, therefore, that the khipu recording system may have more closely approximated a form of writing than has heretofore been supposed.

Unlike every other high civilisation of the ancient world, the Incas did not develop a system of writing based on graphic signs on twodimensional surfaces. Rather, Inca administrative records took the form of three-dimensional knotted-cords made of spun and plied fibers. It is widely believed that khipu technology associated with the rise and expansion of the Inca Empire, during the Late Horizon period (ca. 1400-1532 AD), developed out of an earlier cord recording technology associated with the Wari culture of the Middle Horizon period (ca. 600-1000 AD). There were good studies of the patterns of thread-wrapping on a few Middle Horizon samples and archaeological recovery of one sample from Middle Horizon context. Three Middle Horizon, Wari khipus have been dated between 780-1024 AD. The principal problem of khipu chronology arises with respect to the dating of Inca samples. Thirty-one samples of Inca khipus from museums in the USA, Latin America and Germany have been analysed. The samples were analysed by the accelerator mass spectrometry technique at three laboratories. About half of the samples analysed at the University of Georgia have been analysed twice to get a higher precision. Most of the samples have been dated from Late Horizon times to the early Colonial period, 1500-1600 AD. One of the samples was dated to the beginning of the Late Horizon 1390-1423 AD and another sample was even earlier, i.e. 1188-1282 AD. Unfortunately, the existing calibration data for Inca khipus do not allow high enough sensitivity for precise analysis, thereby requiring a reappraisal of the calibration curve for South America.