2.5: After the Inka Canon - The Khipu (Paper Interface and Its Modern Successors)

Contrary to what one reads in classics of grammatology, khipus had a vigorous continuing history in the colonial era (Salomon 2008). Khipu use up to about 1600 CE has been well researched, most comprehensively by Pärssinen and Kiviharju (2004), and also by historians such as Sempat Assadourian (2002), de la Puente Luna and Curátola (2008), and Loza (1998).

The transition from early, unstable, improvised colonial governance to the bureaucratic regime associated with Viceroy Toledo (1569–1581) also brought a transition in the information technology of empire. As a small ethnic minority in a multilingual empire thousands of kilometers long and inhabited by millions, Spaniards were at first dependent on khipu-based information flows to set up their colonial state. Spaniards from the 1530s through the 1550s relied upon khipu masters for accounting of native tribute and labor. In the 1560s they came to systematically integrate cord records with the production of new administrative papers. There arose a system of articulation between the khipu art and what the Uruguayan humanist Angel Rama (1996 [1984]) called “the lettered city” of Hapsburgian scribes and notaries. Well before 1569 Spanish courts and tribute administrators were accustomed to accepting khipu-based information as evidence in lawsuits and tribute proceedings (even though the Council of the Indies never authorized this). After 1569, in the age when reducción (forced resettlement) and the new political establishment of ‘Indian cabildos’ (village councils) came to counterweight the power of prehispanically-derived local dynasties, colonial governance did much more than passively take note of khipus. Spanish functionaries actively required villages to make and present administrative khipus. Lawyers, scribes, and notaries created a specific protocol governing the interface between intra-indigenous and imperial information conduits (Burns 2004).¹

Although C14 dates of museum khipus sometimes overlap the conquest era, no museum collection has been radiocarbon dated exclusively to the colonial era. We do not yet know what material traits may correspond specifically to the colonial cord – paper interface. Urton (2001) has persuasively interpreted one specimen found in context of a post-hispanic mummy as an account of colonial tributes of the 1560s; in material makeup it resembles Inka work, with peculiarities that are more likely regional than chronological.

Early in the 17th century Spanish judges stopped admitting khipu masters to official functions. Increasingly, the khipu art apparently lodged in folk-legal proceedings off the colonial ledger. In the course of three colonial centuries, khipu shifted from being the Andean politico-administrative medium par excellence, to being very local, intracommunal records created in a sphere of cultural privacy.

After independence (various dates of the 1820s in different republics), creole states recognized no specifically ‘Indian’ authorities as such. Now no pan-Andean khipu user community existed. Khipus were shown to outsiders mostly in the course of administering private latifundist estates. Max Uhle in 1897 published the first full description of an ‘ethnographic khipu’, a herder’s log of animals from Cutusuma, Bolivia. Several other 20th-century reports describe herding khipus (Nuñez del Prado 1990 [1950]; Prochaska 1988; Soto Flores 1990 [1950–1951]), one from as far afield as Ecuador (Holm 1968).

Such ethnographically known khipus are the best understood ones, because in these encounters researchers were able to discuss individual khipus with their makers and users. In 2002 I interviewed several families near the northern and western shores of lake Titicaca, some Quechuaphone and others Aymarophone, about recent memories of the khipu art. Their elders could still simulate khipus made to track household properties: private herds, harvests, debts, and pending obligations. They described household khipus as small khipus which would usually be pegged to a wall, either inside the house for privacy or outside, under the eaves, for daytime convenience. All ‘ethnographic’ khipus are of wool.

What stands out in such ‘ethnographic’ khipus is their nonstandard physical makeup. Carol Mackey’s important but still incompletely published 1970 study of 24 modern specimens, some of whose owners were still competent in the art, uncovered “great variability in morphology and in numeral notation” (Mackey 2002: 324), including one major class without a main cord to suspend pendants (see Figure 11), and another with a main cord. In the former, a data-bearing cord is bent in a ‘U’ and lashed to form a two-tailed armature for attaching smaller cords. Besides morphology, another general problem of khipu design is at its most visible in modern ‘ethnographic’ khipus: iconicity. Some ‘herders’ khipus’ include small non-cord objects in knots. Prochaska (1983) reports that Taquile Island khipus included wood bits taken as iconic of individual animals and their condition. A few Inka specimens have tuft inclusions, as do all Rapaz specimens (see concluding section). Whether inclusions should be understood under the rubric of index, icon, or logogram remains an important issue.

Not all the modern forms of khipu, however, derive from the private sphere. Modern khipus of governance do exist, at village rather than state level. In the early 19th century, decades of weak republican administration (Thomson 2002: 269–280) gave communities in some provinces a chance to invigorate local Andean institutions of government. Some chose to prolong the use of khipu in self-administration. In a few cases, these have survived as patrimony of peasant communities, or their components, the segmentary corporate lineages called ayllus. Like herders’ khipus, they show wide divergences in structure, as one might expect in situations of local cultural privacy. All originate in high-altitude villages (over 3000 m above sea level), and all are of wool.

A few such ‘patrimonial khipus’ have been studied in material detail. The most fully published patrimonial case is that of Tupicocha, in Huarochirí, Peru. Tupicocha owns 10 historical khipus (Salomon 2004; Figure 12) and one recently made simulacrum to replace a lost one. From 1994 to the 2009 writing of this chapter, no-one claimed competence in reading khipus. The village holds them in reverence, and uses them as regalia in the annual ‘town meeting’ at which authorities render accounts for money and works. The actual records are now made on paper, but the quipocamayos or caytus are presented as their former and forever-valid prototypes.

Tupicochan khipus are of medium size. In overall design they closely resemble the canonical Inka type (Figure 13). They show little if any of the ‘reduction’ or ‘defectiveness’ characteristic of moribund scripts. Made wholly or almost wholly of camelid wool, they bear richly ornamented end knobs and dorsal markers. They were obviously made to be treasured, and are spoken of as treasures: “They are our Magna Carta” is how one elder put it. The heterogeneous artifice of pendants suggests they are the work of many hands. Tupicochan khipus match in detail the khipus drawn by the “Indian chronicler” Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala toward 1615.

Rapaz, another central-Peruvian high altitude village, owns the first set of patrimonial khipus ever to catch the eye of a researcher (Ruíz Estrada 1982). The khipu patrimony of Rapaz is the only known case where khipus endure in the original architectural complex of ritual, governance, and storage they were made to serve (Figures 14–15). Moreover, these buildings still house the ongoing work of traditional ceremony and production management, for whose sake khipus are held sacred. The collection consists of 263 discrete cord objects. It is not, as repeatedly misreported, a single “giant khipu” — except in the sense that the ensemble as a whole, with its separate parts, formed in local theory a single register.

The Rapaz patrimonial khipus could hardly be farther from Tupicochan khipus in material makeup (Salomon et al. 2006). Whereas Inka specimens have a single main cord from which multiple knot-bearing pendants are suspended, all the Rapaz khipus share a unilinear design in which all apparent signs are attached directly to a single, sometimes very long cord of camelid or (less often) sheep wool. Some exceed 15 m, but it remains to be seen how much of the length is due to mending. The unilinear Rapaz design is more suggestive of seriated emblems (such as a Siouan winter count, that is, a chronicle composed of emblems for memorable events, or a Panamanian Kuna pictographic manuscript) than of data arrayed on the dual (horizontal / vertical) axes of Inka design. Rapaz emblems, unlike signs on blank hide or paper, rest upon a linear substrate that is complex in its own right. Both S and Z final plying of main cords are common. Main cords range very widely in design, from monochromes to eight-ply specimens with elaborate multiple plying. Almost all their colors are natural fiber hues, but in a few cases plies of died wool extend through mostly-natural cords. Dye colors are greenish-blue or mustard yellow. The features attached to the main cord are not pendants in the Inka sense. Only one pendant like structure in the whole collection is attached with the conventional Inka half-hitch. Rather, attached signs are typically knotted onto the main cord. Common attached signs can consist of either a short piece of tied-on cord, or a short tie-on holding some small object. Most such cords are knotted onto the whole main cord overhand, while some run between plies of the main cord. The objects they bear at their distal ends are tufts of wool in various natural colors, tags of rawhide, tags of hide with wool still on it, pompoms (frequently bicolored), and, in 10 cases, figurines (Figure 16).

One other patrimonial corpus has been described. Nelson Pimentel (2005), working in southwestern Bolivia, has written about what might be called patrimonial ‘memory khipus’. Their originals have been lost. Elders who informed Pimentel replicated with modern yarn four khipus of apparently communal scope. These cords appear to have served as accounts of sacrifices (ch’allay), genealogy, harvests and herds. In some of them, design at the coarsest level resembles the Inca canon. Smaller features may also be relevant to Inka traits: for example, one occasionally finds an Inka pendant tied around an adjacent similar one, a structure here explained as meaning that the former cord annuls the latter (Pimentel 2005: 29). Pimentel’s cords also include structures and conventions potentially relevant to Inka format but not recognized in Urton’s scheme: length of pendants, thickness of pendants, internodal distance, and minor but significant variations of shade within one color (e.g. violet for ‘rebellion’ as against purple for ‘war’, Pimentel 2005: 143). Salomon found related attributions of meaning to these academically unrecognized variables in Tupicocha. And finally, there are structures unknown in Inka khipus, such as cord interlacing (taken as a sign of actions in concert).

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¹ Another khipu – alphabetic interface seems to have been invented on the ecclesiastical side: the hybrid khipu – alphabetic objects known as ‘khipu boards’. Two drawings which may show khipu boards in the catechesis of women come from the remote north coast c.1789 (Martínez Compañón 1985 [c. 1779-1789]: 53–54). In 1852 the scientific traveler Mariano Rivero observed that “in some parishes of Indians, the khipu were attached to a panel with a register of the inhabitants on which were noted “their absences on the days when Christian doctrine is taught” (Sempat Assadourian 2002: 136). Toward 1923, Julio C. Tello and Próspero Miranda observed one in use at Casta, near the northern edge of Huarochirí Province. Its function was to govern participation in the village’s canal-cleaning collective labor days and associated rites honoring the divine owners of water. As late as 1968 another specimen of 19th-century origin was discovered, in disuse, at the church of Mangas in central Peru (Robles Mendoza 1990 [1982]: 9).