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From Middle Horizon Cord-Keeping to the Rise of Inka Khipus in the Central Andes

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From Middle Horizon Cord-Keeping to the Rise of Inka Khipus in the Central Andes From Middle Horizon cord-keeping to the rise of Inka khipus in the central Andes Gary Urton∗ Research Recording devices formed of knotted cords, 0 km 500 known as khipus, are a well-known feature of imperial administration among the Inka N of Andean South America. The origins and antecedents of this recording system are, however, much less clearly documented. Important insights into that ancestry are offered by a group of eight khipus dating from the later part of the Middle Horizon period Lima (AD 600–1000), probably used by the pre- Inka Wari culture of the central Andes. This article reports the AMS dating of four of these early khipus. A feature of the Middle Horizon khipus is the clustering of knots in groups of five, suggesting that they were produced by a peoplewitha basefivenumbersystem.Later,Inka khipuswereorganisedinsteadarounda decimal place-value system. Hence the Inka appear to have encountered the base five khipus among Wari descendant communities late in the Middle Horizon or early in the Late Intermediate period (AD 1000–1450), subsequently adapting them to a decimal system. Keywords: South America, central Andes, Tiwanaku, Inka, Wari, Middle Horizon period, AD 600–1000, khipus Introduction Significant advances have been made in recent decades in the study of Inka record-keeping by means of knotted-cord khipus during the Late Horizon period (c.AD1450–1532), continuing through the colonial period and down into early modern times (see Urton 2003; Salomon 2004; Brokaw 2010). This article concerns the view in the opposite direction; specifically, the time period stretching from the Middle Horizon (AD 600–1000) through to the Late Intermediate period (AD 1000–1450). The latter period came to an end with the emergence of the Inka state in the southern Peruvian highlands (Covey 2006). As will be shown, the strongest evidence for pre-Inka cord-keeping appears to pertain to the Middle * Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, 1350 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA (Email: [email protected]) C " Antiquity Publications Ltd. ANTIQUITY 88 (2014): 205–221 http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/088/ant0880205.htm 205 From Middle Horizon cord-keeping to the rise of Inka khipus in the central Andes Horizon Wari culture. In this article, I will describe and analyse what I will show to constitute acorpusof17MiddleHorizoncordsamples.Together,thesesamplesdisplayasufficiently complex and homogeneous set of features to support the argument that they belong to a tradition of cord-keeping from this period that was shared by a probably diverse group— of indeterminable size—of individuals who employed the cord technology for recording information in the Wari state. The Middle Horizon in central Andean prehistory was dominated by two large, expansive states: Wari, in the central Andes, and Tiwanaku, in the south-central Andes. Wari territory (or societies influenced by Wari) stretched from the northern highlands and northern coast of present-day Peru, southward to the Moquegua Valley and then eastward, into the highlands, to the region that would become the capital of the Inka empire, the Cuzco Valley. Tiwanaku stretched from the southern boundary just delineated to the south and south-east, through the Titicaca basin and on down through present-day Bolivia and into what is today central Chile. Wari and Tiwanaku co-existed for several centuries with little evidence of conflict between them but with a great deal of interaction and sharing of values, ideology and material cultural traditions (see Isbell 2008). Wari and Tiwanaku societies would have had need of administrative accounting technologies as these societies attained high levels of social, political and economic integration and complexity. Accounting in such societies would have involved the management and oversight of state resources, including censuses and other administrative matters relating to conquered/subordinate populations, labour and military recruitment, storage and the redistribution of state goods (see Schreiber 1992: 29). These were all resources that were managed in the Inka empire by a complex administrative structure for which the khipus served as the principal recording device. The question is: how were administrative accounts maintained in Middle Horizon times, in the Wari and Tiwanaku states? I must state at the outset that all of the evidence for pre-Inka accounting that is available to us pertains to sites within territory thought to have been controlled or influenced by the highland Wari polity. The cord-keeping terminology of the Tiwanaku region, which was primarily Puquina-speaking in the Middle Horizon period and Aymara-speaking in the colonial period (Torero 2002; Cerron-Palomino´ 2008), centred on the device known as the chino (see Platt 2002). Unfortunately, we have virtually no information about the characteristics of Tiwanaku chino, nor is it clear to what extent chino accounting technology might have been an ancestral, descendant or parallel tradition to that in use in Wari territory. It is the tradition of cord-keeping in Wari territory that is the focus of this article. Previous studies of Middle Horizon khipus There has been a scant number of articles published to date pertaining to khipus thought to date to the Middle Horizon period. The most notable article is Conklin’s description of 11 examples of what he referred to as “wrapped quipu” (1982: 267). These include a set of nine examples in the Museo Amano, Lima, Peru, recovered by Yoshitaro Amano in 1968 at the site of Pampa Blanca, near the Hacienda Huayuri, in the Santa Cruz Valley, a tributary of the Nazca River, on the southern coast of Peru (Figure 1). These examples were recovered along with what are described as “Huari [Wari] pottery and a Huari mummy”. The pottery C " Antiquity Publications Ltd. 206 Gary Urton Research Figure 1. Khipu examples from Pampa Blanca, Santa Cruz Valley, Nazca River. Now in the Amano Museum, Lima, Peru (from Conklin 1982: fig. 6). was of a type assigned to Middle Horizon 2, which suggests a date of c. AD 700 (Conklin 1982: 267–68). Conklin described three features that were characteristic of the collection of small khipus from Pampa Blanca: “[a] The shanks of the pendant cords are wrapped with patterned multi-coloured thread; [b] there are no long knots present—only multiple so-called simple, or overhand knots; and [c] the plying of the cords is in the Z direction” (Conklin 1982: 268). Spin/ply direction refers to the orientation of the twisted, oblique threads in a string or cord. In Z-spun material, the oblique axis of the threads runs from upper right to lower left (as in a Z), while in S-spinning, the threads run obliquely from upper left to lower right (as in an S). Raw material is spun in one direction (Z or S), and two or more such threads may be united in a ply, which will be twisted in the opposite direction (respectively, S or Z). Conklin went on to incorporate into the collection of wrapped khipus from the Hacienda Huayuri three examples from the collections of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH; see Conklin 1982: figs. 7–9), as well as one other example from a private collection (Conklin 1982: figs. 11 & 12; see Figure 2). Conklin produced a detailed and highly valuable description and analysis—the only one performed to date—of the example from the private collection (Conklin 1982: 275–79). The only other publication known to the author that documents a khipu of Middle Horizon ancestry is an article by Ruth Shady Sol´ıs, Joaqu´ın Narvaez´ and Sonia Lopez´ (2000). In this study, Shady Sol´ıs et al. describe the recovery in 1999 of a khipu from the Huaca San Marcos, one of the principal adobe mound constructions at the site of Maranga, in the lower Rimac Valley. The example was recovered from a sealed deposit in a passageway in Platform 2 of the Huaca San Marcos. Material found at the same level and deposit as C " Antiquity Publications Ltd. 207 From Middle Horizon cord-keeping to the rise of Inka khipus in the central Andes Figure 2. Khipu, private collection (from Conklin 1982: fig. 12). the khipu included sherds of the pottery styles known as Niever´ıa, Lima 9 and Pachacamac, which are generally dated to the Lima culture (AD 200–750; Shady Sol´ıs et al. 2000: 2–4; see Note 1 at the end of this article). The Huaca San Marcos khipu (Figures 3 & 4) measured 118mm in length and bore 12 pendant cords. Five of the pendants are Z-ply and seven are S-ply. Nine of the pendant cords are cotton (as is the primary cord), while three are of camelid fibre. The primary cord has sections wrapped with narrow bands of blue, red and brown threads in a technique similar to the cord wrapping described by Conklin (1982). While no 14C dates were obtained for this example, Shady Sol´ıs et al. (2000) conclude their discussion of the chronological placement of the Huaca San Marcos khipu with the suggestion that it probably dates to Epoch 2 of the Middle Horizon period (AD 650–750). The suggested (relative) dating places this example chronologically at approximately the same time period as the relative dating of the examples discussed by Conklin. To summarise what we have learned Figure 3. Khipu from Huaca San Marcos, Rimac Valley, about supposed Middle Horizon khipus— Lima, Peru (from Shady Sol´ıs et al. 2000: fig. 1). all of which were dated by relative means— up to this time, the following are the central features shared by these samples: a) cotton was the primary material of cord production; b) cords were wrapped in multiple, stacked bands of multi-coloured, camelid fibre threads; c) a predominance of Z-plying (the exception being the Huaca San Marcos example, with its mixed plying directions); and d) the frequent use of simple, overhand knots (with no long or figure-of-eight knots; see discussion of Inka knot types, below).
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