Although none of the Spanish chroniclers laid out for us how to read an actual khipu (there is much general commentary on idealized or abstract samples), nonetheless, the colonial chronicles and documents are the best sources of information on the roles, status and manipulation of these devices in Inca administrative practice. Several useful summaries of the colonial testimony have been published to date (e. g., Locke 1923; Quilter and Urton 2002; Urton n. d.). Chroniclers insist that khipu were consulted in relation to a variety of matters of interest to the Inca state, from censuses and tribute records (Acosta 2002: 349-350; Cieza de Leon 1967: 62, 67; Garcilaso de la Vega 1966: 274-275), to astronomy and calendrics (Guaman Poma 1980), to the keeping of what are often referred to as historical annals (Molina 1916). Both Antonio de la Calancha (1974) and Garcilaso de la Vega (1966) assert that they learned how to read certain types of khipu. These and other sources have been studied closely (e. g., Parssinen 1992; Quilter and Urton 2002), but the data and recording principles described in these accounts have not yet led to significant breakthroughs in decoding extant khipu samples.
In addition to the various accounts and commentaries on khipu contained in the Spanish chronicles, we have a growing body of so-called khipu transcriptions (Parssinen and Kiviharju 2004). These are documents written by Spanish scribes in (Spanish) alphabetic script from translations of readings of khipu given by native record keepers in their native Andean languages (especially Quechua and Aymara). While the khipu transcriptions primarily focus on the types of information that were of most immediate, practical interest to Spanish administrators (e. g., census data and both pre-Hispanic and colonial tribute accounts), two features of these transcriptions render such documents of great importance in present-day efforts to understand how information was encoded onto and decoded from both statistical and narrative records.
In the first place, the identities mentioned in these documents (e. g., individual offices and statuses and various types of plants, animals, manufactured products, etc.) were clearly of enduring significance to the Inca record keepers. Many of these same objects and identities are presumably also recorded in some of the extant khipu. Secondly, it has been shown (Murra 1975; Parssinen 1992) that, while not universal or invariant, the order in which these identities were placed, read and transcribed from samples reflects principles of organization, classification, and precedence that would have had salience in Inca record keeping more generally. Therefore, the khipu transcriptions contain both information and organizational principles that may eventually provide clues for our on-going efforts to decipher Inca statistical and even narrative khipu.
World History
