Notes on the leather khipu boards or ‘wankaunas’ of San Pedro de Casta, Peru

How might a simple synthesis of existing anthropological and historical sources yield fresh insights into an enigmatic and niche area of research increasingly approached through complex statistical and methodological approaches?

This article presents novel findings concerning the kinds of materials used to construct Andean cord notation registers known as khipus (quipus). With a focus on hybrid khipu-alphabetic records known as khipu boards, the article centres on the early twentieth century accountancy customs of the highland Huarochirí village of San Pedro de Casta (Lima, Peru). While existing research has assumed the cords of the elusive Casta khipu board(s) — used to record work performance at the annual irrigation ceremony — to be made from yarn, local testimony holds that they were made from leather. Accordingly, this article represents the first confident identification of a leather khipu register.

In addition to the above, the paper reflects on the use of wood from the succulent plant maguey for producing the boards for these colonial-era and republican era registers.

Finally, it illuminates an area of promise for the ongoing decipherment of khipu boards: the hypothesis that knots on khipu boards recorded the completion of work tasks performed in sequence; an individual could earn a knot for sufficiently completing each task (or phase of a task).