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Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Quipu - South America's Ancient Undeciphered Writing System

An Introduction to the Inca Writing System Known as Quipu

The Quipu's Knotted Complexity
 The Quipu's Knotted Complexity. Amy Allcock / Getty Images
Updated April 14, 2017 
Quipu is the Spanish form of the Inca (Quechua language) word khipu, a unique form of ancient communication and information storage used by the Inca Empire, their competition and their predecessors in South America. Scholars believe that quipus record information in the same way as a cuneiform tablet or a painted symbol on papyrus do. But rather than using painted or impressed symbols to convey a message, the ideas in quipus are expressed by colors and knot patterns, cord twist directions and directionality, in cotton and wool threads.
The first western report of quipus was from the Spanish conquistadors including Francisco Pizarro and the clerics who attended him. According to Spanish records, quipus were kept and maintained by specialists (called quipucamayocs or khipukamayuq), and shamans who trained for years to master the intricacies of the multi-layered codes. This was not a technology shared by everyone in the Inca community. According to 16th-century historians such as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, quipus were carried throughout the empire by relay riders, called chasquis, who brought the coded information along the Inca road system, keeping the Inca rulers up to date with the news around their far-flung empire.
The Spanish destroyed thousands of quipus in the 16th century. An estimated 600 remain today, stored in museums or found in recent excavations or preserved in local Andean communities.

QUIPU MEANING

Although the process of deciphering the quipu system is still just beginning, scholars surmise (at least) that information is stored in cord color, cord length, knot type, knot location, and cord twist direction.
Quipu cords are often plaited in combined colors like a barber pole; cords sometimes have single threads of distinctively dyed cotton or wool woven in. Cords are connected mostly from a single horizontal strand, but on some elaborate examples, multiple subsidiary cords lead off from the horizontal base in vertical or oblique directions.
What information is stored in a quipu? Based on historical reports, they were certainly used for administrative tracking of tributes and records of the production levels of farmers and artisans throughout the Inca empire. Some quipu may have represented maps of the pilgrimage road network known as the ceque system and/or they may have been mnemonic devices to help oral historians remember ancient legends or the genealogical relationships so important to Inca society.
American anthropologist Frank Salomon has noted that the physicality of quipus seems to suggest that the medium was exceptionally strong in encoding discrete categories, hierarchy, numbers, and grouping. Whether quipus have narratives embedded in them as well, the likelihood that we'll ever be able to translate story-telling quipus is very small.

EVIDENCE FOR THE QUIPU USE

Archaeological evidence indicates that quipus have been in use in South America at least since ~AD 770, and they continue to be used by Andean pastoralists today. The following is a brief description of evidence supporting quipu use throughout Andean history.
  • Caral-Supe culture (possible, ca 2500 BC). The oldest possible quipu comes from the Caral-Supe civilization, a preceramic (Archaic) culture in South America made up of at least 18 villages and enormous pyramidal architecture. In 2005, researchers reported a collection of strings twisted around small sticks from a context dated to approximately 4,000-4,500 years ago. Further information has not been published to date, and the interpretation of this as a quipu is somewhat controversial.
  • Middle Horizon Wari (AD 600-1000). The strongest evidence for the pre-Inca use of quipu record keeping is from the Middle Horizon Wari (or Huari) empire, an early urban and perhaps state level Andean society centered at the capital city of Huari, Peru. The competing and contemporary Tiwanaku state also had a cord device called a chino, but little information is available about its technology or characteristics to date.
  • Late Horizon Inca (1450-1532). The best-known and largest number of surviving quipus are dated to the Inca period (1450-Spanish conquest in 1532). These are known both from the archaeological record and from historical reports—hundreds are in museums around the world, with data on 450 of them residing in the Khipu Database Project at Harvard University.

QUIPU USAGE AFTER THE SPANISH ARRIVAL

At first, the Spanish encouraged the use of quipu for various colonial enterprises, from recording collected tribute to keeping track of sins in the confessional.
The converted Inca peasant was supposed to bring a quipu to the priest to confess his sins and read those sins during that confession. That stopped when the priests realized that most of the people couldn't actually use a quipu in that manner: the converts had to return to the quipu specialists to obtain a quipu and a list of sins that corresponded to the knots. After that, the Spanish worked to suppress the use of the quipu.
After the suppression, much Inca information was stored in written versions of the Quechua and Spanish languages, but quipu use continued in local, intracommunity records. The historian Garcilaso de la Vega based his reports of the downfall of the last Inca king Atahualpaon both quipu and Spanish sources. It might have been at the same time that quipu technology began to spread outside of the quipucamayocs and Inca rulers: some Andean herders today still use quipu to keep track of their llama and alpaca herds. Salomon also found that in some provinces, local governments use historical quipu as patrimonial symbols of their past, although they do not claim competence in reading them.

INCA QUIPU CHARACTERISTICS

Quipus made during the Inca Empire are decorated in at least 52 different colors, either as a single solid color, twisted into two-color "barber poles", or as an unpatterned mottled group of colors. They have three kinds of knots, a single/overhand knot, a long knot of multiple twists of the overhand style, and an elaborate figure-of-eight knot.
The knots are tied in tiered clusters, which have been identified as recording the numbers of objects in a base-10 system. German archaeologist Max Uhle interviewed a shepherd in 1894, who told him that the figure-of-eight knots on his quipu stood for 100 animals, the long knots were 10s and single overhand knots represented a single animal.
Inca quipus were made from strings of spun and plied threads of cotton or camelid (alpaca and llama) wool fibers. They were typically arranged in only one organized form: primary cord and pendant.
The surviving single primary cords are of widely variable length but are typically about a half centimeter (about two-tenths of an inch) in diameter. The number of pendant cords varies between two and 1,500: the average in the Harvard database is 84. In about 25% of the quipus, the pendant cords have subsidiary pendant cords. One sample from Chile contained six levels.
Some quipus were recently found in an Inca-period archaeological site right next to plant remains of chili peppers, black beans, and peanuts (Urton and Chu 2015). Examining the quipus, Urton and Chu think they have discovered a recurring pattern of a number—15—that may represent the amount of tax due to the empire on each of these foodstuffs. This is the first time that archaeology has been able to explicitly connect quipus to accounting practices.

WARI QUIPU CHARACTERISTICS

American archaeologist Gary Urton (2014) collected data on 17 quipus which date to the Wari period, several of which have been radiocarbon-dated. The oldest so far is dated to cal AD 777-981, from a collection stored in the American Museum of Natural History.
Wari quipus are made of cords of white cotton, which were then wrapped with elaborately dyed threads made from the wool of camelids (alpaca and llama). Knot styles found incorporated in the cords are simple overhand knots, and they are predominantly plied in a Z-twist fashion.
The Wari quipus are organized in two main formats: primary cord and pendant, and loop and branch. The primary cord of a quipu is a long horizontal cord, from which hangs a number of thinner cords. Some of those descending cords also have pendants, called subsidiary cords. The loop and branch type has an elliptical loop for a primary cord; pendant cords descend from it in series of loops and branches. Researcher Urton (2014) believes that the main organizational counting system may have been base 5 (that of the Inca quipus has been determined to be base 10) or the Wari may not have used such a representation.

SOURCES

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by Nicoletta Maestri (updated by K. Kris Hirst)
Updated June 14, 2016 
Cotton (Gossypium sp.) is one of the most important and earliest domesticated non-food crops in the world. Used primarily for its fiber, cotton was domesticated independently in both the Old and New Worlds. The word "cotton" originated from the Arabic term al qutn, which became in Spanish algodón and cotton in English.
Nearly all the cotton produced in the world today is the New World species Gossypium hirsutum, but before the 19th century, several species were grown on different continents.
The four domesticated Gossypium species of the Malvaceae family are G. arboreum L., domesticated in the Indus Valley of Pakistan and India; G. herbaceum L. from Arabia and Syria; G. hirsutum from Mesoamerica; and G. barbadense from South America.
All four domestic species and their wild relatives are shrubs or small trees which are traditionally grown as summer crops; domesticated versions are highly drought- and salt-tolerant crops that grow well in marginal, arid environments. Old World cottons have short, coarse, weak fibers that are today primarily used for stuffing and quilt making; New World cottons have higher production demands but provide longer and stronger fibers and higher yields.

MAKING COTTON

Wild cotton is photo-period sensitive--in other words, the plant begins to germinate when the day length reaches a certain point. Wild cotton plants are perennial and their form is sprawling.
Domestic versions are short, compact annual shrubs which do not respond to changes in day length--that's an advantage if the plant grows in places with cool winters because both wild and domestic cottons are frost-intolerant.
Cotton fruits are capsules or bolls which contain several seeds covered by two kinds of fiber: short ones called fuzz and long ones called lint.
Only the lint fibers are useful for making textiles; and the domestic plants have larger seeds covered with comparatively abundant lint. Cotton is traditionally harvested by hand, and then the cotton is ginned--processed to separate the seeds from the fiber.
After the ginning process, the cotton fibers are batted with a wooden bow to make them more flexible, and carded with a hand comb to separate the fibers before spinning. Spinning twists the individual fibers into a yarn, which can be completed by hand with a spindle and spindle whorl or with a spinning wheel.

OLD WORLD COTTON

Cotton was first domesticated in the Old World about 7,000 years ago; the earliest archaeological evidence for cotton use is from the Neolithic occupation of Mehrgarh, in the Kachi Plain of Balochistan, Pakistan, in the sixth millennium BC. Cultivation of G. arboreumbegan in the Indus Valley of India and Pakistan, and then eventually spread over Africa and Asia, whereas G. herbaceum was first cultivated in Arabia and Syria.
The two main species, G. arboreum and G. herbaceum, are genetically very different and probably diverged well before domestication. Specialists agree that the wild progenitor of G. herbaceum was an African species, whereas the ancestor of G. arboreum is still unknown.
Regions of possible origin of the G. arboreum wild progenitor are likely Madagascar or the Indus Valley, where the most ancient evidence for cultivated cotton has been found.
Gossypium arboreum
Abundant archaeological evidence exists for the initial domestication and use of G. arboreum, by the Harappan (aka Indus Valley) civilization in Pakistan. Mehrgarh, the earliest agricultural village in the Indus Valley, has multiple lines of evidence of cotton seeds and fibers beginning about 6000 BP. At Mohenjo-Daro, fragments of cloth and cotton textiles have been dated to the fourth millennium BC, and archaeologists agree that most of the trade that made the city grow was based on cotton exportation.
Raw material and finished cloth were exported from south Asia into Dhuweila in eastern Jordan by 6450-5000 years ago, and to Maikop (Majkop or Maykop) in the northern Caucasus by 6000 BP.
Cotton fabric has been found at Nimrud in Iraq (8th-7th centuries BC), Arjan in Iran (late 7th-early 6th centuries BC) and Kerameikos in Greece (5th century BC). According to Assyrian records of Sennacherib (705-681 BC), cotton was grown in the royal botanical gardens at Nineveh, but cool winters there would have made large-scale production impossible.
Because G. arboreum is a tropical and subtropical plant, cotton agriculture did not spread outside the Indian subcontinent until thousands of years after its domestication. Cotton cultivation is first seen in the Persian Gulf at Qal'at al-Bahrain (ca 600-400 BC), and in North Africa at Qasr Ibrim, Kellis and al-Zerqa between the 1st and 4th centuries AD. Recent investigations at Karatepe in Uzbekistan have found cotton production dated between ca. 300-500 AD. Cotton may have been grown in the Xinjiang (China) province cities of Turfan and Khotan by the 8th century AD. Cotton was finally adapted to grow in more temperate climates by the Islamic Agricultural Revolution, and between 900-1000 AD, a boom in cotton production spread into Persia, Southwest Asia, North Africa and the Mediterranean Basin.
Gossypium herbaceum
G. herbaceum is much less well-known than G. arboreum. Traditionally it is known to grow in African open forests and grasslands. Characteristics of its wild species are a taller plant, compared to the domesticated shrubs, smaller fruit and thicker seed coats. Unfortunately, no clear domesticated remains of G. herbaceum have been recovered from archaeological contexts. However, the distribution of its closest wild progenitor suggests a northward distribution toward North Africa, and the Near East.

NEW WORLD COTTON

Among the American species, G. hirsutum was apparently cultivated first in Mexico, and G. barbadense later in Peru. However, a minority of researchers believe, alternatively, that the earliest type of cotton was introduced into Mesoamerica as an already domesticated form of G. barbadense from coastal Ecuador and Peru.
Whichever story ends up to be correct, cotton was one of the first non-food plants domesticated by the prehistoric inhabitants of the Americas.
In the Central Andes, especially in the north and central coasts of Peru, cotton was part of a fishing economy and a marine-based life style. People used cotton to make fishing nets and other textiles. Cotton remains have been recovered in many sites on the coast especially in residential middens.
Gossypium hirsutum (Upland cotton)
The oldest evidence of Gossypium hirsutum in Mesoamerica comes from the Tehuacan valley and has been dated between 3400 and 2300 BC. In different caves of the region, archaeologists affiliated to the project of Richard MacNeish found remains of fully domesticated examples of this cotton.
Recent studies have compared bolls and cotton seeds retrieved from excavations in Guila Naquitz Cave, Oaxaca, with living examples of wild and cultivated G. hirsutum punctatumgrowing along the east coast of Mexico. Additional genetic studies (Coppens d'Eeckenbrugge and Lacape 2014) support the earlier results, indicating that G.
hirsutum was likely originally domesticated in the Yucatán Peninsula .
In different eras and among different Mesoamerican cultures, cotton was a highly demanded good and a precious exchange item. Maya and Aztec merchants traded cotton for other luxury items, and nobles adorned themselves with woven and dyed mantles of the precious material.
Aztec kings often offered cotton products to noble visitors as gifts and to army leaders as payment.
Gossypium barbadense (Pima cotton)
The first clear evidence of domesticated Pima cotton comes from the Ancón-Chillón area of the central coast of Peru. The sites of this area show the domestication process began during the Preceramic period, beginning about 2500 BC. By 1000 BC the size and shape of Peruvian cotton bolls were indistinguishable from today's modern cultivars of G. barbadense.
Cotton production began on the coasts, but eventually moved inland, facilitated by the construction of canal irrigation. By the Initial Period, sites such as Huaca Prieta contained domestic cotton 1,500 to 1,000 years before pottery and maize cultivation. Unlike in the old world, cotton in Peru was initially part of subsistence practices, used for fishing and hunting nets, as well as textiles, clothing and storage bags.

SOURCES

This glossary entry is a part of the About.com guide to the Domestication of Plants, and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 20(5):405-417.
Brite EB, and Marston JM. 2013. Environmental change, agricultural innovation, and the spread of cotton agriculture in the Old World. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology32(1):39-53.
Moulherat C, Tengberg M, Haquet J-F, and Mille Bt. 2002. First Evidence of Cotton at Neolithic Mehrgarh, Pakistan: Analysis of Mineralized Fibres from a Copper Bead. Journal of Archaeological Science 29(12):1393-1401.
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 20(3):223-239.
Peters AH. 2012. Identity, innovation and textile exchange practices at the Paracas Necropolis, 2000 BP. Textiles and Politics: Textile Society of America 13th Biennial Symposium Proceedings. Washington DC: Textile Society of America.
Wendel JF, and Grover CE. 2015. Taxonomy and Evolution of the Cotton Genus, Gossypium. Cotton. Madison, WI: American Society of Agronomy, Inc., Crop Science Society of America, Inc., and Soil Science Society of America, Inc. p 25-44.
Updated by K. Kris Hirst

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History of Textiles

When did People Learn to Make Cloth?

Wild flax fibers from Unit C, Dzudzuana Cave, Georgia
 Wild flax fibers from Unit C, Dzudzuana Cave, Georgia. [Image courtesy of Science/AAAS
Updated August 09, 2016 
Textiles, to archaeologists anyway, can mean woven cloth, bags, nets, basketry, string-making, cord impressions in pots, sandals or other objects created out of organic fibers. This technology is at least 30,000 years old, although preservation of the textiles themselves is rare in prehistory, so it may be quite a bit older still.
Because textiles are perishable, often the oldest evidence of the use of textiles is implied from impressions left in burned clay or the presence of weaving-related tools such as awls, loom weights or spindle whorls.
Preservation of intact fragments of cloth or other textiles has known to occur when archaeological sites are in extreme conditions of cold, wet or dry; when fibers come into contact with metals such as copper; or when textiles are preserved by accidental charring.

THE HISTORY OF TEXTILES

The oldest example of textiles yet identified by archaeologists is at the Dzudzuana Cave in the former Soviet state of Georgia. There, a handful of flax fibers was discovered that had been twisted, cut and even dyed a range of colors. The fibers were radiocarbon-dated to between 30,000-36,000 years ago.
Much of the early use of cloth began with making string. The earliest string-making to date was identified at the Ohalo II site in modern Israel, where three fragments of twisted and plied plant fibers were discovered and dated to 19,000 years ago.
    The Jomon culture in Japan--believed to be among the earliest pottery makers in the world--have evidence of cord-making, in the form of impressions in ceramic vessels from Fukui Cave, and dated ~13,000 years ago. Archaeologists chose the word Jomon to refer to this ancient hunter-gather culture because it means "cord-impressed".
    • Read more about the Jomon
    The occupation layers discovered at Guitarrero Cave in the Andes mountains of Peru contained agave fibers and textile fragments that were dated to ~12,000 years ago. That's the oldest evidence of textile use in the Americas to date.
    The earliest example of cordage in North America is at Windover Bog in Florida, where the special circumstances of the bog chemistry preserved textiles (among other things) dated to 8,000 years ago.
    Silk making, which is made from thread derived from insect cases rather than plant material, was invented during the Longshan period in China, ca 3500-2000 BC.
    Finally, one extremely important (and unique in the world) use of string in South America was as quipu, a system of communication composed of knotted and dyed cotton and llama wool string used by many South American civilizations at least 5,000 years ago.

    FURTHER INFORMATION

    See the links above for references on the specific sites. A textile bibliography has been collected for this article.

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    Monday, May 29, 2017


    July 2011

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