GoKawiilWelcome to The Khipu Field Guide - Travel back in time to the Inkan empire of the 14th through 16th century. Explore how the Inkas used cloth to communicate and record commitments. Journey with me, as I work with other khipu scholars, to decipher the enigma behind a knotted mop of camelid yarn.
This site has seven sections.
TEXTOSBOOK
Textos Andinos, a two-volume book set written by Marti Pärssinen and Jukka Kiviharju, is a translation of original court documents from the Spanish archives, where the plaintiffs used khipus in their court recitations. Called “Paper Khipus”, by Manuel Medrano, these paper khipus were the subject of his Bachelor’s thesis project at Harvard.
DATABOOK
With over two years of work curating and database restoration (affectionately known in the trade as yak-shaving), the Khipu Field Guide now contains the world’s most accurate and largest digital database of Inka khipus - currently 703 khipus. Digitizing is a difficult process. This page describes the painstaking, and still continuing, task of digitizing existing khipus, and restoring malformed digitizations using newly gained knowledge about khipu. For example, if you don’t know how to read Arabic, how can you tell it’s read from right to left? The problems are similar with khipu. Why do I believe some khipus have been accidentally recorded backwards? As you journey through investigations developed in the notebook, you’ll learn about the intriguing patterns that reveal khipu order, even when the khipu is broken, and missing its ends. Yak-Shaving - Assembling the Khipu Field Guide Database
The Challenges of Archaeological Rendering
Methods and Tools
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Much has been written about khipu. This fieldguide builds on Marcia and Robert Ascher’s work summarized in their wonderful book, republished in 1997 by Dover Books, entitled Mathematics of the Incas: Code of the Quipu . Want to learn more? Karen Thompson’s Bibliography work is a great place to start.
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