This is a khipu this is effectively a document. It's an account book.
So just like we would use pen and paper to record something this is doing the recording all through
the different features of the textile and it struck me that nobody had accessed the
information in this khipu before and the closer you look at it the more interesting it gets.
Hi I'm Nicole, I'm a conservator at the British Museum and welcome to my corner!
So if you watched last week's episode of Curator's Corner you would have learned all about khipus.
And this week I'm going to tell you about this specific khipu that I've spent 47 hours looking
at in detail. It's from the Inca empire, so roughly between the 1430s and 1530s so it's about
500 years old and when it came into the studio I really didn't know much about it. I basically knew
it was called a khipu but the more I learned about it I sort of began to fall in love with it because
it's so ingenious and it's now actually become one of my favourite objects in the Museum. When
it came up to the studio my brief was to make sure it was safe enough to go on display at an angle in
the upcoming Peru exhibition. The condition when it came in was very different to what it is now.
It was a tangled mass of cords essentially. So the first job was to untangle those cords. However to
untangle 275 cords that are made of fibres that are 500 years old it takes a lot of time. You have
to be really, really careful because the fibres are really brittle. They're very, very prone to
powdering. And the chords were really liable to break every time I moved one. And in this
case I'd be literally it's almost like tearing a bit of the text and out if that had happened
so I just started to very carefully move each cord back into position and at this stage now
scholars could come and read the khipu. And what I find so fascinating about it is that this is
effectively a document, it's an account book. This is doing the recording all through the different
features of the textile so it's the type of fibre, it's the number of cords that are hanging down,
it's the colours that they've used to make them, it's the direction of the twist that they've made
the chords with and it's the different types of knots and where the knots are on the khipu all
tells the reader different bits of information. Along the top here are what is called a primary
cord and this is in fact three khipus. If you look you can see that you've got one primary cord here;
there's an overhand knot. You've got a second primary cord that again is tied with an overhand
knot to a third primary cord. So we've got three separate khipus that have been tied together.
And hanging down from the khipus are what we're calling pendant cords and each pendant cord has
a series of knots tied into it and those knots are what is recording in this case numerical
information for someone else to read. There's essentially two registers of where the knots lie;
there's a lower register that broadly runs about here for the ones. So between one and nine.
Then there's a second register broadly running about here and that register is for the tens
and so the way you would read the numbers that are recorded in this khipu, you'd start with the
tens there's only one type of knot that are used for the tens and so it's an overhand knot so if
you come across two overhand knots that's 20, four overhand knots that's 40 et cetera. Then
you move down to the ones, there's two different types of knots here. If it's a unit of one it's
a certain type of knot but if it's a unit of two to nine it's a type of knot that has loops and so
you count the loops. So if there's four loops it's a number four, nine loops number nine.
Let's look at reading this light cord here; so we're going to start with the top register
and there's a whole bunch of overhand knots I have to say I still find it really hard to
differentiate between the overhand knots but I think we're gonna so it's one, two,
three, four, five, six, seven I think that's seven
and then we come down to the one to nines or or zero if there's no knot it's obviously zero.
So here we got a nice big number here to count so we're going to count the loops so we've got one,
two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight, okay so we've got 78 so that that cord
is recording 78. Often we think of treatment as being quite hands-on and interventive,
but in this case one of the main jobs of the treatment was to actually make the information in
the khipu accessible and get it out into the wider world so scholars could use that information.
And one of my favourite parts was in fact learning about the Open Khipu Repository;
this is a database that's managed by Jon Clindaniel at the University of Chicago.
They're trying to put all the information of khipus from around the world into the repository
and scholars can access it freely and use it to start making connections and it struck me that
nobody had accessed the information in this khipu before. No one had actually read the khipu,
so the brief I suppose became bigger because this was an opportunity now to contribute
knowledge to that repository. And so the next stage of the treatment was documenting
the data that this khipu held. Every pendant cord was measured, the spin was described, the ply,
the colour was described. Knots can be knotted in the s direction or they can be knotted in the z
direction. Equally the way the pendant cord attaches to the primary cord can be done in
one direction or another direction so all these small details are recorded in the database because
they're all a conscious choice. By putting all the information into an excel spreadsheet I could
start to see patterns. So for example, off of these pendant cords are often another cord that
hangs off of it which is called a subsidiary cord, and what I could see in that database
within certain sections of the khipu. I would look at all, for example, the first subsidiary cords.
So I'm looking at each first one and they all were the same colour and then I'm looking at the
second subsidiary cord and they too were all the same colour, so you're starting to see patterns
very obvious choices that the maker of this khipu made. Why they made it is a different
question. But at least we can start to decipher what those patterns are from the repository.
One of the things I find fascinating about it, and the reason it is my favourite object, is just the
ingenuity behind it and the fact that someone would have picked this up and run their hands
down each pendant court and gotten such a wealth of information. I mean what that information is we
don't know yet, but it's something along the lines of how many goods were given to the community,
what type of labour was paid, who owed what, that kind of thing. But they would just run
their hands and they could feel the type of knot, the number of knots, the type of fibre, the ply,
all that just reinforced to me that this is data and how objects have information in them. They can
give us so much information about different cultures past present and about ourselves.
So if you'd like to come and see the khipu in real life at the British Museum it's
going into the Peru exhibition and all the details are just below me.