Difference between revisions of "Incan Quipu"

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(Formal Prohibitions & Affordances)
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The only addition to ''quipucamayas'' were ''Amautas'', or learned men and councilors, who were also knowledgeable about the techniques necessary to understand the information stored by a ''quipu''. While they didn't have a hand in composing them, the ''Amautas'', along with the ''quipucamayas'', played an integral role in the maintenance of Inca culture as traditions were passed down from generation to generation.
 
The only addition to ''quipucamayas'' were ''Amautas'', or learned men and councilors, who were also knowledgeable about the techniques necessary to understand the information stored by a ''quipu''. While they didn't have a hand in composing them, the ''Amautas'', along with the ''quipucamayas'', played an integral role in the maintenance of Inca culture as traditions were passed down from generation to generation.
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---add: this would cause a problem, as it has indeed done today, with allowing the medium to be used on a more common level--

Revision as of 08:39, 5 December 2007

Brief Description

The Inca quipu remains largely a mystery to today's scholars, and while there are many plausible and likely hypotheses as to true functions this device served, a specific and definite answer has yet, and may never, be uncovered. Some believe the quipu represents a form of proto-writing, while others feel it embodies a system of writing all on its own. But regardless of the different magnitudes of functionality that are thought to have been applied to the quipu by the Incas, it is wholly agreed that it was an extraordinarily intricate system in which to store information.

A typical quipu consisted of a number of pendent and often subsidiary pendent strings that were suspended from a main horizontal cord. Knots representing numbers were tied into the pendent strings and occasionally into the main cord. The strings used in the creation of a quipu were made from cotton, and sometimes from alpaca or llama wool, and were dyed various colors, which explained the subjects to which the numbers referred.

It was the combination of these materials and processes together as a quipu that allowed the Inca bureaucracy to function, as they relied on it, at the very least, as a means to keep detailed accounts and records of everything that occurred under their rule. The cultural quipus mentioned by the Spanish chroniclers "'recorded' laws, rites, treaties, speeches, and history" (Day 39), while the statistical quipus included a catalogue of "crops and agricultural produce, herds of domestic and wild animals, stores of wool and cotton, weapons and other military supplies - everything in the empire, in fact, that could be counted" (Day 39)



Encoding/Decoding: What Does It All Mean?

Mnemonic Knot-Records

There are many scholars that firmly believe the quipu to be an extremely advanced and detailed mnemonic device; a function that it seems to have carried out very efficiently and successfully. In noting how precisely traditions and records were preserved, Sir Clements Markham describes the passing down of the Paccari-tampu myth. "It is told by Garcilasso de la Vega, Cieza de Leon, Betanzos, Balboa, Morua, Montesinos, Salcamayhua and Sarmiento, all agreeing sufficiently closely to prove that precisely the same tradition had been handed down, with the same details, to their various informants" ( Markham 140).


and Knot-Calendars

Binary Coding

Formal Prohibitions & Affordances

The quipu as a communicative device was highly selective; only the privileged, important men of the Inca community were taught how to create and interpret this system of recording. These were the Quipucamayacs, or quipu-makers. As aforementioned, the Inca civilization functioned as a bureaucracy, which, according to Max Weber, is a type of administration that fundamentally means: "the exercise of control on the basis of knowledge" (Ascher 33). Therefore, for the Incas, knowledge truly did equal power, and that knowledge was measured in large part by the amount of records they had stored.

Furthermore, Ascher and Ascher notes the characteristic nature of a bureaucracy as one where its records are peculiar to itself, and remain that way. So to be a quipucamayac signified specialized knowledge, power and status, but also the responsibility of being an official historian for the Inca empire.

Understandably, quipucamayacs "never 'let their quipus out of their hands,' says Garcilaso, 'and they kept passing their cords and knots through their fingers as to not forget the tradition' which it was their function to remember" (Day 39-40). Perhaps one of the few times the quipucamayacs would separated from their quipus was for the purpose of sending a messgae. According to Cyrus Lawrence Day, "Trained runners called chasquis were stationed in pairs at intervals of about a mile along the imperial highways. Running at top speed and handing their quipus on, one chasqui to another, as in a relay race, they could transmit a message to Cuzco from two or three hundred miles away in twenty-four hours" (39).

The only addition to quipucamayas were Amautas, or learned men and councilors, who were also knowledgeable about the techniques necessary to understand the information stored by a quipu. While they didn't have a hand in composing them, the Amautas, along with the quipucamayas, played an integral role in the maintenance of Inca culture as traditions were passed down from generation to generation.

---add: this would cause a problem, as it has indeed done today, with allowing the medium to be used on a more common level--