By Ashok Khosla
“In fact, the two-dimensional diagrams of the quipu, which have their own long history of more than a hundred years, can now be generated digitally, with perhaps Olaf Witkowski's in 2007 being the first of these efforts. Figure 15 shows a cutting-edge example: Ashok Khosla's Khipu Field Guide initiative, developed almost 15 years after Witkowski... The attention paid to detail by all these projects anticipates a future in which each digital quipu will be paired with its own interactive three-dimensional model, either computer-generated or based on photographs of its physical strings."
Quipus - Mil años de historia anudada en los Andes y su futuro digital - Manuel Medrano
I love The Khipu Field Guide by Ashok Khosla, because it presents diagrams of khipus that are easier to analyze than photos.
ArchaeoEd - A Podcast about Ancient Civilizations of the Americas - Dr. Edwin Barnhart
Welcome to The Khipu Field Guide - Travel back in time to the Inkan empire. 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 four sections.
- An INTRODUCTION describing khipu in brief, and the aims of this site
- A SKETCHBOOK to view the khipu using a symbolic likeness of the original cords and knots.
- A NOTEBOOK analyzing the khipu, by type, cluster, cords, etc.
- A CODEBOOK providing the technical details of this project.
1. Introduction¶
If you're not a khipu scholar, the Introduction is a good place to start. You'll learn how khipus are constructed, what this site is about, and whether or not modern scholars can decipher Inkan khipus.
2. SketchBook¶
Use the SketchBook to view the world's largest catalog of khipus (currently 650 khipus), digitally reconstructed and rendered symbolically, from measurement tables extracted and reconstructed from a variety of khipu authors and sources.
3. NoteBook¶
From the NoteBook you can access exploratory information about khipus - their construction, how they vary, and how they can be analyzed.
3.1 Khipu Type Analysis¶
Various types of analysis can be done on khipus to categorize them into types - accounting vs possibly narrative. Calendar vs census, etc. Analyzing khipus often involves a micro level analysis first (shown later), so this is a circular process. Start high-level, work down, project up, etc.
3.2 Khipu Cord Cluster and Cord Analysis¶
Most of the detailed khipu analysis is done at the cord and cord cluster level. In this section "fieldmarks" such as cord twist, knot direction, etc., are common or significant.
3.3 Ascher Cord Relationships¶
Marcia Ascher, who wrote The Code of the Khipu with her anthropologist husband Robert Ascher, did an outstanding job at exploring the mathematical relationships of "accounting" khipus. That work is reviewed and expanded here: Marcia Ascher's Mathematical Analyses
3.4 Cord Color Analysis¶
In 2015, Sabine Hyland visited the village of Collata, where she was invited to study 17th to 18th century khipus that had been secretly held for centuries. She discovered, in the knot plys and immense color range, that these khipus had a phonetic basis. Could cord color be the key to unlocking khipu language?
An attempt at understanding color usage starts here: Cord Color Analysis
4. CodeBook¶
If you are interested in the technical details of this project, then the CodeBook is the place to browse.
5. Bibliography¶
Would you like to learn more about khipus? Kylie Quave's Bibliography is a great place to start.