Anthropologist Sabine Hyland's journey to Jucul—a remote Andean village six hours north of Lima, Peru—centers on one of the world's oldest mysteries: khipus, the mysterious knotted or tasseled cords that Incas used to record information, and that Jucul's villagers, wary of outsiders, had kept hidden for centuries. Hyland, from Scotland's University of St. Andrews, hoped the tangled bundles stored in garbage bags might help crack the code of an almost-lost Incan writing system, per the Atlantic.
The Incan empire, which flourished in the 1400s and 1500s, used khipus for everything from accounting to other records. While about 1,400 khipus survive today, scholars estimate that there were once hundreds of thousands. Deciphering them hasn't been easy, either—most surviving villagers have little idea what's recorded, and the Spanish conquest erased much of the traditional knowledge.
Hyland's recent discovery in Jucul is promising. The cords themselves stretched to nearly 225 feet, breaking previous records. Deciphering the khipus is slow going, complicated by the variety of materials, knot or tassel patterns, and colors—not to mention the likelihood that different khipus might mean different things. Among the khipus she observed were a pink coca pouch, ritual items, and the remnants of a doll that possibly represents a deity. One khipu even had cigarettes attached to it, per IFL Science.
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The field, recently shaken by the removal of Harvard's leading khipu scholar, Gary Urton, over misconduct allegations, is seeing renewed collaboration. Advances in radiocarbon dating, artificial intelligence, and traditional linguistic tools like puns all hold promise in helping to figure out what the khipus mean. Whether they'll ever yield a full translation remains to be seen. A release notes that Hyland is set to be interviewed on June 16 for Australia's Late Night Live program.
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