The khipu played a central role in Inca administrative practice, as these knotted-string accounts emerged from and gave testimony to the work of organizing, classifying and representing information relating to the composition and distribution of material goods and other resources, including political power, in the Inka state. Despite our understanding of the important role played by these devices in Inkaic administrative practice, we still lack detailed, in-depth knowledge and understanding of khipu semiosis and “reading” procedures. Specifically, one of the key questions facing khipu researchers is what the
Spanish meant when they wrote in their own ink-on-paper records that the khipukamayuq “consulted” information recorded on khipu in recounting historical and other types of narrative accounts. Was this “consulting” an act of reading what essentially was a script, with fully formed grammatical units registered three-dimensionally on the khipu strings? Or did the khipu function more like a registry of general signifiers evoking classes of objects, actions, places and times that were given more nuanced form and substance by a khipukamayuq, who would have brought to the reading of these sketchy notes, or cues, information retained in his memory, as well as a range of creative, discursive practices for producing a narrative appropriate to a given place and perhaps audience? Or was the manner of “consultation” somewhere between the extremes of the continuum of styles from the restricted, literal reading procedure, at one end, to the more open, free-form procedure, at the other? The answers to these questions, which we are unable to provide at the present time, will go a long way toward ultimately determining whether or not the khipu recording and information system should be considered a true writing system.
As was argued in numerous works published during the reflorescence of anthropological historical studies in the Andes at the end of the last (twentieth) century (e. g., Abercrombie 1998; Julien, 2000; Urton 1990; Wachtel 1977), the control of history was one of the principal sources of power in both late pre-Hispanic and early colonial times in the Andes. In the former period, Inka recordkeepers were engaged daily in collecting, classifying and registering in the khipus information vital to the attempt to control and exploit subject populations over the extraordinary swath of land that stretches from what is today Quito to Santiago de Chile. In the early colonial period, many of these same native record keepers and their direct descendants found themselves locked in what can only be described, from the present-day perspective, as a life and death struggle with an alien state built around political institutions, bureaucratic procedures and a religious ideology quite unlike any that had previously existed in the Andes. Intimately related to, underlying, and reinforcing these Spanish colonial institutions, procedures and ideologies was a record keeping system that operated on a glottographic, alphabetic recording principle that was almost assuredly different from anything that had existed in Andean recording technology up to that time.
Accounting and writing systems are directly concerned with the classification, control and representation of information about the world. As history played itself out in the early colonial Andes, the alphabetic script and the political system it supported decidedly won out over the Andean cord - and knot-based recording technology. Just as Andean peoples struggled to create a space for their cord-based representations of self and society in the context of a world ultimately won over by the technology of alphabetic writing and the Hindu-Arabic numeral signs, we are left today with the challenge of reading in and through the accounts produced by means of these same grapheme/numeric traditions, as well as interpreting the archaeological record, information and representations that can help us arrive at an understanding of what was surely one of the most extraordinary recording technologies of the ancient world—the khipus.
World History
