Nell Greenfieldboyce (2:09)

Yeah. I mean, the colors contained meaning. The position of the knots along the cord, the type of knot, the numbers of chords. Like everything was a kind of code. And literacy in this form of writing or record keeping was assumed to be this kind of rare, esoteric thing that only the highest levels of Inca society could do. You know, kind of this elite practice by men in the ruling class. But you know, what Kit and a colleague recently told me is that they came across this one set of really unusual knotted strings that has called all of that into question.

Regina Barber (2:48)

Ooh, I love where this is Going today on the show why anthropologists may have been wrong about which members of the Inca empire made these ancient records and what that means for understanding how these knots are related to objects that some people still make today. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from npr.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (3:14)

This message comes from Schwab. Everyone has moments when they could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education and human help when you need it. This message comes from BetterHelp. As a dad, BetterHelp President Fernando Madera relates to needing flexibility when it comes to scheduling therapy.

Fernando Madera (3:37)

I have kids under 18, so, like, time is very limited. That's why at BetterHelp, our therapists try to have sessions, sometimes at night, depending on the therapist, or during the weekend. So I think that's what we need to tell the parents. You're not alone. We can help you out.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (3:53)

If a flexible schedule would help you, visit betterhelp.com NPR for 10% off your first month of online therapy.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (4:03)

This message comes from Bombas. Nearly 30% of marathoners end their race blistered. Bombus running socks are strategically cushioned to help. Say bye to blisters. Run to bombus.com NPR and use code NPR for 20% off your first purchase.

Regina Barber (4:20)

Okay, now let's just help people visualize what these Inca knot records look like. I'm sitting here, I'm looking at this picture you sent me from the Smithsonian, and we've got this like long cord, sort of horizontal in the photo. And then hanging down vertically from that horizontal cord are these other cords with knots in them.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (4:39)

Yeah, so there's the so called main chord, the horizontal one, and then the ones hanging down from it are called pendant cords. And the whole thing, the whole record is called a khipu. The word comes from part of the Inca language that means knot. And everything has meaning in this thing. The placement of the knots along the strings, the order of the strings, their color, everything is thought to be kind of a record, something that somebody could look at and make and read to look at, you know, a census or crop records or whatever they wanted to be counting and keeping track of.

Regina Barber (5:16)

And what we're looking at right now is like half a millennia old. Like, can people still read this today?

Nell Greenfieldboyce (5:22)

It's hard. I mean, some Khipos are thought to contain numerical information so they can sort of tell that the knots are arranged in a decimal system with like a place for tens, a place for hundreds. I mean, there's lots of things you would want to count like that.

Manny Medrano (5:34)

Right.

Regina Barber (5:35)

That makes a lot of sense, that decimal system to me.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (5:38)

But the thing is, there aren't really a lot of khipus still in existence from the Inca empire. I mean, they were made of cotton, so a lot just kind of degraded in the environment.

Manny Medrano (5:46)

Yeah.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (5:47)

And then the Spanish colonizers actually destroyed and burned a lot of them.

Sabina Hyland (5:50)

Oh geez.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (5:51)

So in museums and universities worldwide, there's only about a thousand quipus still in existence and there's often no information about where they originally came from.

Regina Barber (6:01)

Yeah, I can see how that would make it very hard to like learn more about them, to be able to read these records.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (6:07)

I was talking to Harvard University khipu researcher Manny Medrano and I asked him, like, to what extent can people today read Khipus?

Manny Medrano (6:15)

Well, it depends which khipus we're talking about. Right. Because of an Inca khipu that came out of a grave, for example, you know, from the 1400s. I'm not aware of any modern reading, let's call it of an object of that age that is universally agreed upon.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (6:29)

But then you've got khipus that have been made by communities in the Andes in more recent times. You know, there is this tradition of kind of symbolic nodding.

Regina Barber (6:37)

So you could just ask them. Right.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (6:39)

And researchers do. I mean, Kit Lee told me, you know, some are related to agriculture, like keeping track of herds, but you also.

Kit Lee (6:47)

Have, during COVID you had a resurgence of funerary khipus, which are more of a cultural religious signifier as well.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (6:55)

So.

Kit Lee (6:55)

So both of them are happening like.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (6:57)

People are buried with a sort of long khipu string tied around their waist. But Lee told me it's been thought that these modern practices weren't really related to the more ancient khipu records from the Inca empire.

Manny Medrano (7:09)

Yeah.

Regina Barber (7:10)

Why do they assume that?

Nell Greenfieldboyce (7:11)

Well, for one thing, the modern khipus just look different, like they have a different shape. And then there's the people who make them.

Kit Lee (7:18)

And modern khipus tend to be made by lower status people. So hacienda workers, peasant laborers, herders.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (7:26)

And like I said before, you know, records from the colonizers said that khipus in the Inca empire were made by elite men. So you know, this high level bureaucracy at the top levels of the ruling class of this empire.

Manny Medrano (7:38)

Yeah.

Regina Barber (7:39)

And you said that this may be called into doubt with like this one set of knotted strings, Right?

Nell Greenfieldboyce (7:45)

Exactly. So it's a khipu acquired by the University of St. Andrews and. And Sabina Hyland works there. She told Me she initially thought this thing was a modern khipu, but then she did scientific dating and it showed that this khipu was about 500 years.

Sabina Hyland (8:02)

Old, which astonished me. That was the first surprise. Then Kit, I was showing it to Kit and this was the second surprise. Kit looked at me and said, sabina, this primary cord is human hair.

Regina Barber (8:15)

I love her enthusiasm, but like human hair? How is that the key here?

Nell Greenfieldboyce (8:21)

Well, you know, they had thought like, okay, maybe it's animal hair. But when Kit was looking at it, she's like, no, it's too long and glossy to be, you know, animal hair, like from a llama or something. I mean, this is a long dark brown cord made of long human hair. It's like three feet long. So it's like years of hair growth.

Sabina Hyland (8:40)

What it is is a person cut off a hank of their hair and then they doubled it over and twisted it.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (8:47)

The reason this is important is that she knew of some historical information suggesting that herders and others would sometimes tie human hair to a khipu as a kind of signature.

Manny Medrano (8:58)

Right. Okay.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (8:59)

So she thought maybe this hair came from the person who made this khipu.

Regina Barber (9:03)

But. But there's no way to know for sure that it was the person who made it.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (9:07)

No, you don't know for sure. But she knew that in the Inca Empire, hair had a lot of meaning as a sort of personal signifier. Like the emperor hair clippings were saved during his lifetime and worshiped just as he was, you know.

Manny Medrano (9:20)

Okay.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (9:21)

And so she thought, here I have this hair that could be from the maker of this khipu. And she realized she could do a chemical analysis of the elements like carbon and nitrogen in this hair to get clues about what kind of food this person ate. This is a kind of analysis that's been done a lot in the past on like, things like mummies.

Regina Barber (9:40)

This is so fascinating. I love it. What did she find?

Nell Greenfieldboyce (9:43)

Well, she says it didn't look like a rich person's diet. Wow.

Sabina Hyland (9:46)

This person who, who appears to have made this khipu had the diet of a commoner.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (9:52)

So not a lot of meat and not beer made from maize, which was the popular ritual drink of the ruling class.

Manny Medrano (9:58)

Okay.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (9:59)

And I asked her, I was like, look, maybe this person was just a vegetarian, you know? And she was like, sure, you could theoretically avoid meat, but maize beer is.

Sabina Hyland (10:08)

Different because these very high ranking elite Khipu officials, as part of the process of getting record keeping, they were involved in rituals in which it was mandatory to drink a lot of maize Beer.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (10:25)

She just doesn't think that was avoidable if you were in the ruling class.

Regina Barber (10:29)

So then this means that this person must have not been, right, an exalted person. They might have been a commoner. Right?

Nell Greenfieldboyce (10:36)

I mean, that's the idea. And if that's true, then maybe the Spanish colonizers got it wrong when they wrote these accounts of what they thought was going on in the Inca empire. Very possible. Maybe literacy in khipu making and reading was more widespread. And Kit Lee told me that, you know, the Inca empire and the Khipus have really been mythologized to a certain extent. There's this idea of it being a.

Kit Lee (11:00)

Glorious past of the Andes, that it's a bygone day, you know, because the Spanish destroyed it, colonialism destroyed it.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (11:06)

And, you know, if it was destroyed, then there's this assumption that, of course, these not records that people make today are just this kind of, like, degraded form of what used to be this, like, glorious past. Sabina Hyland told me, everyone knew, right?

Sabina Hyland (11:19)

The khipus were only made by high status elites who were wiped out by the Spanish. So khipuyu stops, and anything modern people do is just almost like a triviality.

Regina Barber (11:30)

I assume she doesn't feel that way at all.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (11:33)

Not at all. Not at all. Like, last year, she was invited to this community called Jacul. It's this remote village in the Andes that has khipus.

Sabina Hyland (11:43)

They asked me to look at it. They'd never shown their khipus to outsiders before.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (11:47)

And for one thing, these ancestral khipus she saw had human hair tied to them, which the people told her was like a signature of the maker.

Regina Barber (11:56)

Ooh, this is fascinating.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (11:58)

Yeah, and these khipus also had a lot of tassels on them. And she told me that ancient Inca khipus can have tassels on them too. And so she's hoping to go back next year and learn more about the tassels and, like, what kind of meaning they have by just, you know, talking to people there.

Regina Barber (12:12)

I know, talking to people, it's a radical notion, very old school.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (12:16)

It's not like using AI. It's just talking with people.

Regina Barber (12:22)

Nell, thank you so much for bringing us the story.

Nell Greenfieldboyce (12:24)

Oh, it's my pleasure.

Regina Barber (12:26)

This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and lightly edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones and Nell checked the facts. Maggie Luthar was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to shortwave from npr.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (12:55)

This message comes from NPR sponsor Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all E commerce in the US get started with your own design studio. Sign up for your $1 per month trial@shopify.com NPR this message comes from Thrive Market.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (13:15)

The food industry is a multi billion dollar industry, but not everything on the shelf is made with your health in mind. At Thrive Market, they go beyond the standards, curating the highest quality products for you and your family while focusing on organic first and restricting more than 1000 harmful ingredients all shipped at your door. Shop at a grocery store that actually cares for your health@thrivemarket.com podcast for 30% off your first order plus a dollar 60 free. Gift it this message comes from Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile took what's wrong with wireless and made it right. They offer premium wireless plans for less and all Plans include high speed data, unlimited talk and text and nationwide coverage. See for yourself@mintmobile.com Switch.