Up to this point I have commented only on canonical Inka-type khipus. But it has become evident that, like many of the culture traits which the Inkas falsely claimed as their own inventions, khipu had a long and varied pre-Inka history. In this matter, too, William Conklin has made a decisive contribution. In 1982 he showed that about 700 years before the Inka conquests began, khipus had already reached an elaborate — but very different — physical format (see Figure 7). One corpus consists of eight fragmentary khipus found with a Wari culture mummy at Pampa Blanca on the south coast of Peru. The burial is dated about 700 CE on ceramic criteria. Similar specimens have less clear context.
Wari, an expansive culture associated with a southern Peruvian state of possibly imperial makeup, was one of two cultures that characterize the period of far-flung cultural sharing called the Middle Horizon. Conklin identified three material peculiarities: first, “the shanks of the pendant cords are wrapped with patterned multicolored thread” (Conklin 1982: 268); second, knotting is less salient and varied: the only knots are multiple overhand knots; third, final plying is uniformly Z. Two more unprovenanced khipus, each small enough to fit in one hand but richly crafted, belong to the same type. Their thread lashings are bright-colored and complexly patterned with color bars and Xs. Both subsidiaries and knots, in contrast, are much less frequent than in Inka examples. Conklin describes a final, large and remarkable thread-wrapped khipu with 100 pendants in groups of five, and 10 different types of subsidiaries hanging from them. Conklin (1982: 277) suggests that the numerical system is base five.
Long before the Inkas, then, Middle Horizon khipu seem to have had a different material constitution. It corresponded to an exalted use, as we know from their treasure-grade craftspersonship. One equally luxurious specimen seems transitional between the Middle Horizon and Inka khipus (Pereyra 1997). The Inkas held Middle Horizon remains in reverence as ‘prototypes’ (dechados; Betanzos 1987 [1551]: 11–13) of their world, and may have viewed thread-wrapping as a sign of archaic glory. If they associated wrapping with remote antiquity they were not mistaken, for this practice appears in textiles of a cultural horizon very much older than even the Middle Horizon: that is, the Chavín or Early Horizon, about 1000 BCE.
There is another Andean medium that emphasizes wrapping. Thread-wrapping of sticks had a two-millennium life alongside thread-wrapping of khipus. Jeffrey Splitstoser has studied fourcolor Chavín-influenced wrapped sticks from the Paracas site of Cerrillos (Conklin and Splitstoser 2009; see Figure 8). They accompanied a female burial dating to about 200 BCE. Imagery of birds carrying such sticks ranges from Chavín through Middle Horizon chronology. Numerous wrapped sticks of immediately pre-Inka, Inka, or immediately post-Inka times are preserved in museums (see Figure 9). Herrmann and Meyer (1993) have published astonishing images of late prehispanic mummies holding wrapped sticks (see Figure 10).
What do wrapped sticks have to do with mummies? Miguel Cabello Valboa, a chronicler who had access to local native informants (Núñez-Carvallo 2008: 92), among them the half-Inka Jesuit Blas Valera, states that the last prehispanic Inka sovereign, when he felt death approaching, “made his testament as was the custom…putting lines [rayas] with different colors on a stick, from which they knew his last and final will, and which was given in care to a khipu master” (Cabello Valboa 1951 [1586]: 393)
It seems, therefore, that a very ancient, elaborate thread-wrapping medium belonged to funerary culture, perhaps holding directives for the permanent ritual treatment of the ancestor. Middle Horizon khipu may have been born when another, knot-based medium was combined with it. The origin of the knotting medium is unknown. Ruth Shady et al. (2000) identifies a knotted object from Caral on the Pacific coast as a khipu at least 3000 years old (Mann 2005: 1008), but other archaeologists have yet to confirm the identification. On less controversial grounds Shady et al. (2000) also show a knotted specimen c.650–750 ce from Lima, roughly contemporary with Conklin’s (1982) thread-wrapped type.
