2.12: Articulation with Auxiliary Media

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Formal relations within khipu could readily be transcribed into other secondary media to speed up manipulation. Transcripts of colonial trials involving khipus mention that khipu testimony was not necessarily rendered directly from cords to verbal forms, but often through an auxiliary medium, of which the usual one was small stones arranged and manipulated on the ground. Apparently this procedure enabled experts to answer by reorganizing and perhaps recalculating partial khipu contents, as one might do today with a spreadsheet, schedule chart, or wiring diagram. Manipulation through an accessory medium could be a complex enough process to require a court recess (de la Puente and Curátola 2008). We also know that Andean peoples possessed abacus-like aids in the form of counting-boards called yupana which held counting tokens in ordered cells (Wassén 1990 [1931]).