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A College Student Who Decoded the Data Hidden in Inca Knots
- TN1ck 9y agoWhat they actually found out: “Manny has proven that the way in which pendant cords are tied to the top cord indicates which social group an individual belonged to. This is the first time anyone has shown that and it's a big deal,”
- degenerate 9y agoThanks for saving me a lot of time.
- vinchuco 9y agothat, and he noticed the numbers in the cords matched the numbers in a census record.
- lorreykay 9y agoAnd "The colors of the strings also appeared to be related to the people’s first names."
- tzahola 9y agoSo the knots are basically census records? How disappointing :/
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoWriting in general began as accounting practices. Put your grain in the common granary, get some token (pebbles) for each measure you put in. Redeem them later. Then they started keeping the tokens in a box. Then they wrapped the tokens in clay envelopes marked with your family symbol. But they had to keep breaking them open to count them, then re-wrapping them, so they started putting hash marks on the outside of the envelope. Then they finally realized they didn't need to put anything in the clay, just the hash marks. Voila, writing!
- crescentfresh 9y agoWhat are you summarizing here exactly, how money was invented? It sounds very neat!
- nickbauman 9y agoBabylonian Cuneiform.
- garmaine 9y agoNone so fast. It allows us to corroborate the Spanish records with the actual records kept by the natives. That’s a pretty big deal in terms of finding out what parts of the conquest were fact what were fiction.
- saalweachter 9y agoAnd to read any pre-Columbian census records which have survived, which is also a Big Deal.
- neves 9y agoNo, it can be great. The Inca had no money: http://www.discover-peru.org/inca-economy-society/ http://www.discover-peru.org/inca-economy-society/ but they had to distribute goods for all the members of society. The knots were probably central to their organization. If they find older records, it would also corroborate the claims that more Incas died from the diseases bought from the Spaniards, than by violence during the invasion.
- FrameworkFred 9y agoDisagree. To me, it looks like a data structure. It would be really cool to find evidence of them using it to calculate taxes or maybe social status, level of political influence, property rights, etc. ...or to figure out whether or knot the interpreter would halt ;)
- kevin_thibedeau 9y agoNot so disappointing if this becomes the Rosetta stone of khipus.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoThese knots are census records. > Urton says he and other researchers in the field have always had a general sense of what the khipus represented. Many, they could tell, had to do with census data. Others appeared to be registers of goods or calendar systems. They've known for a while that many kinds of data were recorded with khipus, but (it sounds like) they couldn't read anything but the raw numbers, which were meaningless without context. Medrano has basically discovered a Rosetta Stone, the same data in both a known and unknown language, and it could very well lead to cracking the full language of the khipus. And don't underestimate census records alone. There's a lot of tremendously valuable information to researchers there.
- f1notformula1 9y ago"Medrano worked with Urton over the next several months and the two compiled their findings into a paper which will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Ethnohistory in January. Medrano is the first author on the paper, indicating he contributed the bulk of the research, something Urton notes is extremely rare for an undergraduate student" I read that to mean there's more, but it'll be published in Ethnohistory.
- laretluval 9y agoAnyone have a link to the paper?
- HAL21 9y agoIt is titled "Toward the Decipherment of a Set of Mid-Colonial Khipus from the Santa Valley, Coastal Peru" and is due in January.
- da_chicken 9y ago> Medrano comes from a Mexican-American family and speaks Spanish, so understanding the Spanish census document was no problem. Handling numbers and data came naturally to him as well, as an economics major. The challenge, as both Medrano and Urton note, seemed to demand a perfect alignment of his skills and interests. I wonder how many unsolved problems there are out there with this problem. Problems that are solvable, they just lack one mind that can view the issue from the proper perspective. I suspect that as the breadth of human knowledge increases, this type of problem will become more and more common.
- tenkabuto 9y agoHopefully people that lack the proper perspective won't lead those with the proper perspective to not even try.
- snarf21 9y agoEven more so, there is a question I asked a professor a long time ago. Does learning make us dumber? As we learn things and take them as absolute truth, we limit our ability to explore new ideas and concepts. The search is sometimes the more important thing.
- teej 9y agoThere’s a reason why Max Planck said: > “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
- stevenwoo 9y agoThe recent lichen genetic revelation that rewrote textbook definitions is similar, kinda magical coincidences in all the things that had to fall into place (or survivorship bias?/good writer telling story). If you are not familiar with it - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/how-a-guy-from-a-montana-trailer-park-upturned-150-years-of-biology/491702/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/how-a-gu...
- neves 9y agoGreat, I went to Peru last year and all guides said that the Inca knots were a mistery.
- photojosh 9y agoI grew up there and left in '99... they've always been a mystery. So excited to see that they've been (at least partially) deciphered!
- Sniffnoy 9y agoNon-mobile link: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/khipus-inca-empire-harvard-university-colonialism https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/khipus-inca-empire-har...
- partycoder 9y agoSince the paper has not been published, just be conservative and wait for peer review before making big announcements.