Inca Knots Offer New Record

A Harvard team has begun to decipher Inca knotted strings, a breakthrough that would allow them to study the Inca Empire through its own records, rather than through artifacts or Spanish chronicles.

Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian Studies Gary Urton and first-year archaeology graduate student Carrie J. Brezine used a new database to study patterns on the strings, known as khipu. The strings were used as a recording system in the Inca Empire, which reached its height in the late 1400s in what is now Peru.

The database, designed by Brezine, allows the researchers to compare color, thread, and knot configurations and uncover links between different khipu. The Inca usually organized the knots into levels that constituted a decimal place system, but the researchers also found knot configurations that represented place names rather than numerical data.

Although there exist about six or seven hundred khipu in museums around the world, Urton said they have historically been studied as individual, isolated objects, due to the complexity and length of the khipu.

“A moderate-size khipu is 15 to 20 pages of notations of numbers and colors,” Urton said. “The database gives us strategies of approaching khipu in ways that were not conceivable before, providing us with a high level of speed analysis and comprehensive analysis of a large body of khipu.”

The database project, which began three years ago, helps to address Urton’s earlier frustrations with the lack of available sources on Inca culture. Before the decoding of khipu, there were only two sources of information about the Inca Empire, both of which were unsatisfactory, Urton said. Inca artifacts provided only a mute testimony and Spanish documents recorded Inca life as their conquerors saw it.

“The khipu represent for us...the only potential source of indigenous, autonomous information,” Urton said.

Brezine said she was intrigued by the complexity and flexibility of the Inca recording system.

“What really fascinates me about khipu is the use of fiber as a medium for recording important data,” said Brezine, who is a mathematician by training and a weaver by avocation.

“[They’re] very portable, and the density of information that can be contained on a single string is quite large, perhaps even rivaling bits and bytes,” Brezine said.

Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art Thomas B. F. Cummins said the new research could dispel the notion that the Inca had only a primitive recording system.

“[These discoveries] would move [khipu] away from that kind of ‘illiterate’ sense of the Inca to one that has its own system of recording that is different than, but comparable to, alphabetizing,” he said.

—Staff writer Lulu Zhou can be reached at luluzhou@fas.harvard.edu.