From Quipucamayocs to Neoquipucamayocs

For me, as for a large part of the ex school students in Peru, the quipus are a key piece of that "ancestral heritage" explained (or flattened) in a didactic as a story that went together with the Incas, the Wari, and the Lord of Sipán: all the complex and largely still unintelligible cultures of our ancestors that are presented to us since school times as what constitutes our National Identity. And it is that, as Peruvians, sometimes it seems that we are only the preserved remains of that legendary past: that is the image that with effort we (re) build and export to an exterior where we are rarely seen as innovators, discoverers, or inventors, and, if so, then usually falling within a framework that could be considered exotic when that cultural legacy - that of before but not now - is commonly referenced.

Frank Salomon, an important American anthropologist, tells how one of his most important collaborators in his research work in the town of San Andrés de Tupicocha was, in fact, a child: Nery Rojas, then of school age, took the knowledge that he shared his grandfather, perhaps the last Quipucamayoc, strengthening them with what he was taught in school about the theories related to the orders and magnitudes that the knots embedded in the strings of the quipus (indicated through their position and number of turns) that part of a system developed by the anthropologist couple Robert and Marcia Ascher (initially proposed by Leland Locke) and which is the most robust decoding method to date. Contrary to what is affirmed somewhat mediatically, there is still no certainty that the Quipus have contained something similar to text or even words, at least not as we conceive them: mostly used for the management of taxes and accounting In general, nowadays it is relatively easy to understand how the vast majority of specimens found store numerical data, that is, depending on the position and the turns that each knot has (each turn representing a unit), in such a way that the most knots close to the main string (from where they hang) are those that represent the highest magnitudes (tens, hundreds, etc.), and those knots that approach the end of the pendants, since they define the units of the amount represented (although there is a type of knot that is understood as the unit "one", which follows the format of a double knot or "eight").

It is speculated that the colors of the strings, and some markers that were placed on them, also served to provide information about clans (ayllus) and other population classifications. However, there are a few quipus found that, despite following the Inca structure, do not follow the model of number of turns or knot position that we spoke about earlier: these are the ones that have given rise to the interest of discovering and verifying the hypothesis that, in fact, these Quipus contained a type of writing system. This captivating thesis has attracted various researchers, mostly from large American and European Universities, who, a bit in the style of Indiana Jones as well, have visited many Andean peoples seeking access to specimens, extracting the data that ideally support that ambitious theory. which, if not true, could make the once development and management of an Empire as complex and vast as that of the Incas become incomprehensible (or impossible). With this I do not want to deny the relevance of this search: my intention is finally to highlight a dynamic that often leaves people and their stories aside or that can end up interpreting them to the liking of the investigator on call. It is also worth noting that this classification, the finally subjective differentiation between the historical and the prehistoric through the marker of what is written (or not), would be what keeps the pre-Columbian South American peoples mired in a tacit prehistory that only seems to end with the arrival of the Spanish and their Bibles containing the annotated word.

Of Quipus and Graves

Today these textile accounting tools are referred to as the technology of the past, appearing even in the list of the "Dead Media Archives" of New York University along with the abacus, the jacquard loom, and text-based computer games. Along these lines, we are often told that they are objects found in burials, that they were used by communities that had already disappeared, and that they followed a single format: that of a main rope, from which the data that kept the data hung. The truth is that an example of this textile tool has been found even in the citadel of Caral (considered the oldest in America), although the renowned Gary Urton questioned, at the time, the antiquity that the Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady proposed for the specimen found in the place (2500 years). Beyond specifics, the Caral quipu gives us an idea, albeit uncertain, of how long and complex the history of the quipus is. It is worth clarifying that even the Wari used them, although in a different format than the Inca - in fact, the system of knots in strings as a method of notation seems to have been developed by many cultures worldwide, although the basic structure of the quipus would be unique.