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2.9: Lightness, Portability

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    It has often been noticed that khipu are a portable medium par excellence. They weigh little, and can be easily compressed, flexed or rolled. They are not fragile. They are well suited to a society in which logistics over extreme mountain terrain was and remains a problem. The Inka state created a human Pony Express of relay runners (ch’aski) who carried khipus; Guaman Poma (Figure 18) drew a ch’aski of the Inka post tearing past with a khipu labeled “letter” in his hand. The Inka empire, with its intricately standardized systems of intervention and control over local polities, can hardly be imagined without the means to move large bodies of data in standard formats over distances. It would be no exaggeration to call coding of information on textile fiber a core infra- structure of Andean social organization.

    This page titled 2.9: Lightness, Portability is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Kathryn Piquette (Ubiquity Press) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.