Knots of the Empire 

The Inca Empire of South America left behind some of the most striking monuments of the ancient world, from the soaring stone terraces of Machu Picchu to a vast road network crisscrossing the Andes.  

But perhaps its most enigmatic legacy is the “khipu,” a system of knotted cords that encoded information without a written alphabet. Long assumed to be the exclusive domain of the elite, new evidence suggests these records may have been created by ordinary people as well.

The findings center on a recently analyzed khipu with a primary cord made entirely of human hair. Radiocarbon dating places it as being made around 1498, decades before the Spanish conquest.  

Lead author Sabine Hyland wrote in the Conversation that she initially thought the strands came from alpacas or llamas, until her colleagues corrected her.  

The cord in this case measured around three feet in length and took more than eight years to complete. That length provided scientists with a unique archive of the individual’s life: Analysis of the sample showed that the individual lived in the highlands of southern Peru or northern Chile and mainly subsisted on a modest diet of tubers, legumes, and grains. 

These foods were not the typical diet of an elite Incan, which included meat and especially maize beer. 

“It’s not really possible to escape drinking (maize beer),” Hyland told NPR. “Even today, in the Andes, when you participate in rituals, you have to drink what you are given.” 

She explained that in Inca cosmology, hair carried a person’s essence. Incorporating it into a khipu could act as a signature, embedding the maker’s identity into the record.  

Museums hold hundreds of khipus that remain unstudied. If others are found with similar signatures, they could challenge many of the records of Spanish colonizers to reveal a more complex history of Inca recordkeeping. 

“This hair analysis adds another piece of evidence to the growing belief that khipu production and literacy might have been more widespread in the Inca Empire than the Spanish colonizers assumed,” co-author Kit Lee told NPR.  

Harvard researcher Manny Medrano, who was not involved in the work, said the findings will help broaden the narrative around the Inca civilization. 

“Ultimately, this gets us closer to being able to tell Inca histories using Inca sources,” he added. “We need to tell a story of literacy and of writing and of recordkeeping in the Inca Empire that is way more plural, that includes folks who have not been included in the standard narrative.”