The Disappearance of Writing Systems - Perspectives on Literacy and Communication - John Baines
Late Khipu Use
The Disappearance of Writing Systems - Perspectives on Literacy and Communication - John Baines
Frank Solomon
University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Description
Quechua khipu (pl. khipukuna) and Aymara chinu (pl. chinunaka), both mean ‘knot’, and both denote objects of cord used in the Andes to store and share information. Peruvian schoolbooks and popular media locate the khipu in a triangle together with Inka rule and Quechua speech. But all three sides of the triangle crumble under research pressure. Dialectology and diachronic linguistics (Cerrón-Palomino 1987: 79–217; Parker 1963; Torero 1974) have shown that the ‘Quechua II’ dialect which served as an administrative language of the Inka state is only one of a family of Quechuas spoken before, during, and after Inka rule. Likewise archaeology and ethnography show that the Inka khipu (Urton 2003), though by far the most common kind of khipu, belonged to a family of fibre-based media originating long before Inka rule (Conklin 2003; Splitstoser et al. 2003) and outlasting it, as we shall see, by over 400 years.