With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Gary Urton of Harvard University will investigate the Inka khipus (or quipus), the knotted-string devices used for record-keeping in the Inka empire of pre-Columbian South America. The khipu was used to record and monitor information vital to the Inka state, including census data, tribute records, astronomical cycles and calendrical schemes, and the storage of food and manufactured products in state storehouses. Spanish records of the 16th century state that khipu-keepers recorded information in the knotted and multi-colored strings of the khipu. To date, researchers have only partially reconstructed khipu recording methods. It has been shown that quantitative information was recorded in a base 10 (decimal) system of number registry. It is thought that the identities of objects were indicated by colors and by employing numbers as labels, rather than as magnitudes. One objective of the project is to determine how different kinds of information were recorded and to attempt to decipher these records. The principal investigative tool is an electronic database which has been developed over the past four years.
The Khipu Database (KDB) has been populated by information from careful, scientific observations of khipus in museums in Europe and North and South America. The KDB now contains all measurements and observations (e.g., of string construction, colors, numerical values, etc.) pertaining to 350 of the estimated 750 khipus in existence. Extant khipus originally pertained to numerous archives in the Inka state. Each archive represented the accounts retained by administrators who oversaw affairs in a particular province within the empire. To date significant progress has been made in reconstructing and investigating a half dozen archives and in exploring the complex relationships linking different samples in various museum collections.
Work in 2006-07 will involve the reconstruction of additional archives; the search for inter-connections (e.g., matches, close matches, and accounting hierarchies) between khipus; establishing proveniences for unprovenienced samples; the investigation of anomalous khipus (ones bearing knots not tied in decimal fashion); analysis of khipu data using complex statistical procedures; expansion of project website; and data entry.
The significance of this project is the investigation of the most complex non-alphabetic recording system known from the ancient world but one whose techniques of information registry have eluded scholars for centuries. The KDB project has identified construction features and recording procedures never before recognized. The broader impacts of the study are the production of a searchable database that can be compared with those of other ancient writing/recording systems (e.g., Sumerian cuneiform, Maya hieroglyphs). The intellectual merits of the project rest on rendering accessible for study the heretofore completely mysterious administrative, legal and historical records of the largest state of the ancient New World -- the Inka empire.
