00:00These girls are learning to tie some very special knots.
00:05It's an ancient and unusual accounting system.
00:08The Incas used it every day to count and record goods, textiles, ceramics, even llamas.
00:14The system is called quipu, which means knot in Quechua.
00:18The Incas used this as a kind of tool to manage their empire.
00:24But how can these complex structures be decoded?
00:28And were they used for more than just counting?
00:38We're heading to Santiago, the capital of Chile.
00:42This area was once part of the southernmost edge of the Incan Empire.
00:47Some ancient quipus are being kept here for preservation.
00:51The Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art has an especially large one on display.
00:57Archaeologists Varinha Varela and Felipe Armstrong are studying the intricate system.
01:03The Incas used quipus to manage their vast empire.
01:06They didn't have a written language, but there was plenty to administer and to document and record.
01:13They used it for censuses, animal counts, agricultural production, mining and more.
01:19It allowed the empire to understand what the provinces needed.
01:24Each community across the empire had its own quipu camayocs,
01:28officials responsible for managing and interpreting the quipus.
01:31Researchers believe they passed their knowledge down from generation to generation.
01:36Incan messengers called chasquis brought the quipus from the provinces to the capital Cusco,
01:41where they were evaluated and used for administration.
01:48The quipus consist of a main cord known as the mother rope,
01:53which will hold all the hanging threads.
01:58The subsidiary cords hang from the main cord,
02:03and sometimes those subsidiaries also have their own branches.
02:09There are different types of knots, like simple knots that are formed by looping the rope.
02:16You loop it and then you pull.
02:19Four loops tied in a simple knot represent the number four.
02:23One loop, two loops, three, four.
02:26There's also the figure eight knot, or double knot, which represents the number one.
02:33The position of the knots determine their place value, such as units of thousands, hundreds or tens.
02:41This is one thousand, four hundred, ninety and two.
02:47At the museum workshop in Santiago, the girls are learning how to tie number knots.
02:53This one is the year they were born, 2014.
02:58Although many quipus have been studied, only a handful have been fully decoded.
03:05Many questions remain, like what the different colors, shapes and materials mean.
03:14We still don't know what qualitative elements are being represented.
03:22We know the numbers, but we don't know whether they refer to animals, dishes, taxes or textiles.
03:36Researchers are still working to unravel this ingenious system.
03:42Much of the knowledge about quipus was lost during the Spanish conquest.
03:54When the Spanish arrived, they were mainly interested in territory, production and control,
03:59so numerical quipus were most relevant to them.
04:02They didn't care all that much about other kinds of quipus, like narrative or astronomical ones.
04:10Some indigenous communities in Chile and Peru still use simple versions of quipus.
04:16In workshops like this, the ancient knowledge is being passed on to the younger generation.
04:22The girls are learning there's another way of counting, by tying knots that are read by touch.
04:28It's hands-on math, a legacy of their ancestors.
Comments