The New York Times reports today on the recent discovery of several knotted string records, called khipus, that ancient Incas used to record things such as the colorful potatoes I photographed at a Peruvian market. From what I saw on my travels there—see this blog on Incan agriculture experiments, a great deal of food must have been produced and stored.
Based on this Times picture I suspect these “mops that have seen better days”, as George Gheverghese Joseph, a mathematics historian at the University of Manchester, U.K., put it, must be a bit easier to untangle than Christmas lights. But then there remains the problem of deciphering them.
Thus far researchers have picked up on mathematical aspects of the khipus. However, the latest trove of colored strings provides a chance at figuring out the Incan scheme for identifying what was being counted. Here is where database capability and statistical methodology comes in handy.
I amazes me how all of the technology we now have at our disposable is challenged by methods developed 600 or so years ago. Hats off to Incan ‘thinken!
“Many now think that although khipu probably began as accounting tools, they had evolved into a writing system—a kind of three-dimensional binary code, unlike any other on Earth—by the time the Spanish arrived.”
— Cracking the Khipu Code Science magazine.