In July 2015, my husband and I were crammed into a stuffy van with 12 other people, climbing the coastal mist of Lima in the sunny mountains at night. thousands of meters. After hours of dust clouds and vertiginous hairpin bends, our destination has appeared below: the remote Andean village of San Juan de Collata, Peru. It was a scattering of adobe homes with no running water, no sewage and no electricity for just a few houses. The few hundred inhabitants of this community speak a form of Spanish strongly influenced by the Quechua of their ancestors. The arrival to the village gave the impression of entering another world.
My husband and I spent our early hours in Collata making formal presentations to village officers, asking for permission to study two rare and valuable objects that the community has kept for centuries: twisted clusters and colored called khipus . After dinner, the man responsible for the community's treasures, Huber Brañes Mateo, a middle-aged rancher, brought a colonial chest containing the khipus, as well as goat skin packets of the 17th and 17th century manuscripts. 18th century - the secret heritage of the village. We had the immense honor of being the first foreigners allowed to see them.
Over the next two days, we will learn that these multicolored khipus, each just over 2 feet long, were narrative epistles created by local leaders during a period of war in the 18th century. But tonight, exhausted and exalted, my husband Bill and I simply marveled at the colors of the delicate animal fibers: crimson, gold, indigo, green, cream, pink and shades of brown, chocolate tan.
At the apogee of the Inca Empire, from 1400 to 1532, there would have been hundreds of thousands of khipus in use. Today, there are about 800 in museums, universities and private collections around the world, but no one knows how to read them. Most are supposed to record digital accounts; Accounting khipus can be identified by the tied knots in the strings, which are known to represent numbers, even if we do not know what these numbers mean. According to the 16th century Spanish chroniclers who saw the khipus still used, others record narrative information: stories, biographies and communications between administrators in different cities.
Discovering a narrative khipu that can be deciphered remains the only way to discover it. one of the holy grails of South American anthropology. If we could find such an object, we could perhaps read how Native Americans saw their history and rituals in their own words, opening a window to a new Andean world of literature, history and art .
Until recently, scholars believed that the khipu tradition was extinguished in the Andes shortly after the Spanish conquest in 1532, only lingering in the simple ropes made by the breeders for keep track of their flocks. Yet, in the 1990s, anthropologist Frank Salomon discovered that the villagers of San Andrés de Tupicocha, a small rural community in the same province as Collata, had continued to make and interpret the khipus in the early 20th century. . In San Cristóbal de Rapaz, to the north, he discovered that local people kept a khipu in their ritual of preaching that they venerate as their constitution or Magna Carta. Although the inhabitants of these villages can no longer "read" the ropes, the fact that these khipu have been preserved in their original village context, which is incredibly rare, promises new perspectives on this mysterious communication system.
Since 2008, I have conducted field research in the central Andes, in search of communities whose khipu traditions have endured in modern times. In Mangas, a village north of Collata, I studied a hybrid khipu / alphabetic text of the nineteenth century, while in Santiago de Anchucaya, a community near Tupicocha, I discovered that the villagers used accounting khipus until the 1940s.
Meche Moreyra Orozco, the head of the Collatinos Association in Lima, contacted me unexpectedly a year before our trip to Collata. She wanted to know if I wanted to visit her native village where, she says, two khipus were kept. In Lima, Meche had seen the National Geographic documentary Decoding the Incas on my research on the khipus in the central Andes, and so knew that I was an expert on the khipus of the region. Meche understood that the Khipus Collata were an essential aspect of Peru's cultural heritage. Meche and I negotiated for months with the village authorities to allow me access to the khipus; she kindly welcomed my husband and me to his house in Collata while we were there.
From our first morning in Collata, we had 48 hours to take photos and take notes on the two Collata Khipus and the manuscripts that accompanied them - a difficult task, given their complexity. Each khipu has more than 200 hanging ropes tied on an upper rope almost as long as my arm; the hanging cords, of an average length of one foot, are divided into irregular groups by ribbons of fabric knotted on the upper cord. Like about a third of the khipus known today, these contained no knots coding for numbers. While I was examining the khipus, Bill, an expert in medieval history who used to read ancient Latin manuscripts, scanned the outdated Spanish written documents.
It was clear that the Khipus Collata did not look like any of the hundreds I had seen before, with a much wider range of colors. I asked Huber and his companion, who had been assigned to watch us while we were studying the khipus, about them. They told us that the pendants were made from fibers from six different Andean animals: the vicuña, the deer, the alpaca, the llama, the guanaco and the viscacha (the latter being a common rodent hunted for food) . In many cases, the fiber can only be identified by brown deer hair and brown vicuna wool, for example, but they are very different. They asked me to handle the khipus with my bare hands and taught me how to feel the fine distinctions between them. They, and others in the village, insisted that the fiber difference is significant. Huber called the khipus an "animal language."
When I later questioned older men at Collata about the khipus, they told me that the khipus were letters ( cartas ) written by local chiefs during their battles in the 18th century. Until a few years ago, the existence of the khipus was a fiercely guarded secret among older men, who passed the responsibility of the colonial archives to younger men when they reached maturity.
The role of the Khipus Collata in the eighteenth century war echoes Solomon's conclusion that khipu communications played a role in a rebellion of 1750 just south of Collata. The text of an eighteenth-century khipu missive used in the revolt of 1750 survives, written in Spanish by a local colonial official, even though the original khipu has disappeared.
Why did the locals use the khipus instead of alphabetic literacy, which they also knew? Presumably because the khipus were opaque to colonial tax collectors and other authorities. The secret would have allowed them to protect themselves.
The Khipus Collata, I discovered, was created as part of an indigenous rebellion in 1783 centered in the two villages of Collata and San Pedro de Casta. The General Archives of India in Seville, Spain, contain more than a thousand pages of unpublished testimonies of captured rebels who were interrogated in prison in 1783; their words tell the story of this revolt. Felipe Velasco Tupa Inca Yupanki, a charismatic merchant who peddled religious paintings in the mountains, declared a revolt against Spanish rule on behalf of his brother the Inca emperor, who he said lived in the deep splendor of the forests eastern tropical. Testimony of captured rebels tells that Yupanki ordered the men of Collata and neighboring villages to lay siege to the capital of Lima, in order to place his brother - or more likely himself - on the throne of Peru.
In January 1783, Yupanki spent two weeks in Collata, arousing revolutionary fervor and naming the mayor of Collata as his "captain of the people." Wearing a lilac-colored silk overcoat, with mauve ruffles around his neck, Yupanki must have cut a striking figure. His attack on Lima had barely begun when an accomplice betrayed him by reporting the conspiracy to the Spanish regional administrator. A small group of Spanish troops captured Yupanki and his associates, and, despite a fierce ambush by the rebels of Collata and Casta, carried him successfully to the Lima jail. There, he was tortured, tried and executed.
In reading the trial notes, it is clear that the most damning evidence against Yupanki was letters detailing the conspiracy, written on paper in Spanish and found among his possessions. His senior lieutenants also carried alphabet letters discussing their efforts to raise troops, providing irrefutable proof of their guilt. The Spanish authorities have never found comparable written letters among the rebel leaders of Collata, despite the many testimonies implicating them in the rebellion. The management of Collata has completely escaped prosecution, while keeping their war khipus in their cherished archives.
How did Collata's khipus encode their messages?
My analysis suggests that these khipus may be logosyllabic, which means that they record their messages through a combination of phonetic and ideographic symbols. The pendants have 95 different combinations of color, fiber type, and ply direction, which seem to code for different sounds or syllables; Other logosyllabic languages usually have 80 to 800 different symbols in their writing systems. Each khipu, with a few hundred pendants, could reasonably contain 150 words, about twice the length of this paragraph.
According to the local village tradition, the first khipu was created in the 18th century by the chief jefe ) of the main lineage of Collata, who is called Alluka . If you assume that the first khipu was signed at the end with the name of the lineage, Alluka then the last three pendants should represent A, LLU, and KA. Interestingly, the last pendant of this sequence is blue, and the local word for blue was ankas ; maybe the KA comes from the name of the color. This information can then be used to decipher the end of the second khipu: Its pendants sound A, KA, which is followed by a final, unknown syllable. This last pendant is gilded brown called published . If this pendant represents PAR, then the second khipu could reasonably sound Yakapar one of only two lineage names in Casta.
Other signs seem to represent whole words or ideas; for example, the villagers have said that the bright red deer hair at the beginning of one of the khipus indicates that the khipu is about the war on behalf of the Inca king.
Collata khipus are the first authentic khipus ever convincingly theorized to be logosyllabic. If confirmed, this will be the first discovery of a unique and unknown form of logosyllabic writing, a form that communicates sounds through three-dimensional strings of animal fibers that must be felt as well as seen.
This raises a lot of questions. These logosyllabic khipus were they a local phenomenon influenced by contact with Spanish writing, or did they have deep roots in the pre-Columbian Andean past? Were the other types of khipus that were used in the central Andes up to the 20th century, such as those for accounting, share features with the phonetic khipus? What are the implications of a three-dimensional writing system, in which the sense of touch plays a role as important as the sight, and how does this expand our understanding of what is' l & # 39; 39; writing "?
Although these khipu have been hidden in the past, far from the prying eyes of foreigners, the village authorities of Collata and the other central Andean communities where I worked on the ground are eagerly awaiting the recognition of their precious cultural heritage. With my help, the village council of Collata has created a package of information on their khipus to use in the village school. As one community leader wrote, "It is imperative that our children know the value of their cultural heritage here in Collata so that they do not abandon their village when they grow up."
On June 24, 2017, which is the official holiday of the village, the village council and the president of the Peasant Association of Collata officially introduced a Spanish translation of my report Current Anthropology on their khipus in their precious archives.
The extraordinary khipu texts of the central Andes, including the logosyllabic animal fiber cords, are a proud testimony of the intellectual achievements of the Native American peoples, and my research team and I are just beginning to decipher the khipus collata. We will work with the people of the region for years to come, to better understand their fascinating history and culture, and if we are lucky, we could even unlock the mysterious and unique code of their ancestors.
This work appeared for the first time on SAPIENS under CC BY-ND 4.0 license. Read the original here. 
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