How khipus indicated labour contributions in an Andean village: An explanation of colour banding, seriation and ethnocategories

Sabine Hyland

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Latin American history and culture Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Amazonian Archaeology and Ethnohistory

Abstract

New archival and ethnographic evidence reveals that Inka style khipus were used in the Andean community of Santiago de Anchucaya to record contributions to communal labour obligations until the 1940s. Archival testimony from the last khipu specialist in Anchucaya, supplemented by interviews with his grandson, provides the first known expert explanation for how goods, labour obligations, and social groups were indicated on Inka style Andean khipus. This evidence, combined with the analysis of Anchucaya khipus in the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología y Historia Peruana, furnishes a local model for the relationship between the two most frequent colour patterns (colour banding and seriation) that occur in khipus. In this model, colour banding is associated with individual data whilst seriation is associated with aggregated data. The archival and ethnographic evidence also explains how labour and goods were categorized in uniquely Andean ways as they were represented on khipus.

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References

2020The Material Culture Reader 1987The rise of accounting controls in British capitalist enterprises 2003Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records 2004The Cord Keepers 1923The ancient quipu or Peruvian knot record 2002Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu 2011Their way of writing : scripts, signs, and pictographies in Pre-Columbian America 2008The interplay of conceptions of accounting and schools of thought in accounting history

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2021Khipus, Khipu Boards, and Sacred Texts: Toward a Philology of Andean Knotted Cords 2019MATERIAL ENCOUNTERS: KNOTTING CULTURES IN EARLY MODERN PERU AND SPAIN 2019Calendars in Knotted Cords: New Evidence on How Khipus Captured Time in Nineteenth-Century Cuzco and Beyond 2024A New Naming Convention for Andean Khipus 2024How Can Data Science Contribute to Understanding the Khipu Code?

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