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What 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 belonge
by TN1ck 9y ago
What 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.