As a small boy I spent a considerably large chunk of my time playing with toys. Matchbox cars, LEGO bricks, and even a humble collection of koala plushies were the mainstay of my bedroom floor décor. As each play session eventually had to come to an end, I would stop and leave my precious toys as they were. No longer animated by my imagination, they lay there where I left them on the floor, patiently and stoically waiting for me to resume where we left off. Now, I could at times on repeated occasions swear that my toys have in fact moved while I was away. Eventually, I developed the notion that they must have been alive all along, secretly moving in my absence, rearranging themselves, putting each other back on my shelves, or migrating to other parts of the house. As I grew—and so I did in 21st century Hungary—these suspicions slowly faded. However, had I been born in the rural Andes instead, these hunches would perhaps have never left me. Yet, as a researcher of the khipu, I find myself haunted by them once more.

An inspirited world

Translating the word for the makers of khipus from Quechua, khipukamayuq, we tend to label them as khipu experts or masters. Following descriptions from Spanish colonial chronicles we also often refer to them as administrators, accountants and historians. Cleverly, Frank Salomon named khipukamayuq ‘cord-keepers’ as a pun on record-keepers and a genius term that has stuck with us since^[1]. Nevertheless, all of these renderings of khipukamayuq into English fail to capture an equally important—near-occult in a Western sense—aspect of the job.

The -kamay- part is what is at play here. Thanks largely to the Huarochirí Manuscript,^[2] one of the only written historical sources we have in Quechua, we can infer much more about the depth of this term. To Quechua speakers kamay is a vivifying essence, an unseen creative energy with the ability to bring to life the inanimate.^[3] A kamayuq is someone in possession of this animating power to create with skill.^[4] Weavers and potters, awaykamayuq and mankakamayuq respectively, not only crafted their arts, but they channelled the power of kamay into their products imbuing it with life force.

This effervescence of the seemingly lifeless in the Andes goes beyond the thresholds of the artificial world. Another term, wak’a refers exactly to such spirited entities. Sacred places, persons and objects with a particularity or significance that dotted the Andean landscape could all be wak’as.^[5] For example, Inka stories describe former ancestors and deities who transformed into massive rocks. Such rocks could turn alive to be asked for advice or even to fight as warriors, before turning back into cold stone.^[6] Similarly, when a ruler passed away and his remains were mummified, he continued to be fed and cared for by his descendants, consulted as an oracle and advisor and remained in possession of lands he owned before his passing.^[7] In this sense, Inka kings merely transformed but never actually died. Sacred natural landmarks such as mountains and lakes were likewise thought to be beings with their own agency. If not treated well with offerings, they could repel with disrespect, bringing drought or illness.^[8] Such beings were not ‘alive’, biologically per se, but certainly acted as powerful social and spiritual entities within Andean society. They were in a sense people with capabilities, preferences and attitudes. As Catherine Allen puts it, “for pre-Columbian Andeans, the world was animated; the whole material universe was potentially alive and imbued with spirit”.^[9] Smaller objects were no exception. In fact any material manmade or otherwise was personified. Images meticulously painted on Moche vessels from 100-700 CE often depict, whilst documents such as the Huarochirí Manuscript describe the so-called Revolt of the Objects.^[10] In this narrative theme instruments, such as clubs and mortars, came alive, growing limbs and heads to attack their human creators.

Chatting with books

We suppose that the products of khipukamayuq fit into this world. In a way Inka cord keepers did ‘animate’ their khipus to a degree that even non-natives could agree with, even if the explanation behind it would differ.^[11] Although in their present condition khipus now appear static, bound behind glass panes or kept safely and lifelessly in boxes out of view, once they were in active use. The bygone cord keepers had to tighten the primary cord of the object in the air with two hands so that the information could be read from it. One can imagine how, due to the force from above, the pendants representing llamas, people and maize would come to dangle on the flexing cord, becoming animated, just as in a field a flock of camelids, a group of people, or maize kernels might move or dance in the wind. By animation though, I mean something else. They too manipulated the kamay to bring their khipus into being.

Now, just like ancient ancestors, khipus were also key actors of Inka society. Compared to a parchment or paper document a khipu was a much more active form of representing, not so much human speech, but interaction. Their presence was the physical hallmark, the tie, between individuals involved in said interactions, be them a record of firewood collection in a village or of maize tribute in an imperial storage building. Moreover, if neigh every piece of the Andean cosmos could be charged with the animating force of the kamay, then why would the khipu, the object literally embodying social relationships, be an exception? Were then khipus alive?

Khipu fragments from the archaeological site of Huacones-Vilcahuasi, kept at the Museo Municipal de Cerro Azul, Cañete, Peru. They were recently sampled by the author for isotopic analysis (Photo by the author).

As khipu scholars would have us believe, it seems that the answer to this question is a likely yes; though again in the sense of a ritual efficacy and social agency rather than heart-pounding, organic life as we define it. Recently, my supervisor Dr. Sabine Hyland mentioned to me that weavers in Cuzco design their complex warp techniques in order to refrain from ever having to cut into the fabric to avoid hurting the garment. Textiles and their patterns are in fact seen as anthropomorphic beings in some contemporary Aymara communities.^[12] Khipu may very well have been conceptualized in a similar manner. As D’Altroy suspects khipus were “sentient repositories of information, whose knowledge could be called on as needed”.^[13] Tristan Platt likewise suggested that the readings or declarations of khipu records are comparable to the deeds of shamans, who could combine a “living being’s ‘voice’ with oral exegesis”.^[14] Salomon has also shown that khipus in Tupicocha were consulted as the oracles for guidance, not simply as records of divination. They “know and decide what the petitioner cannot”^[15]. Such preserved documents were treated as a primal source of authority, resembling the role of ancestors, “immobile, everlasting, socially ‘present,’ and forever interrogated”^[16]. Writing from his sanctuary in the jungles of Peru, the penultimate Inka emperor, Titu Cusi Yupanqui remembered^[17] that Europeans were seen “alone talking to white cloths” referring to the reading of books and letters, an idea foreign to the ruler. Perhaps the Spaniards were only speaking the words on the page. Yet Cusi’s account hints at something deeper, that Andeans may have recognized in European writing something like the khipu itself: a living thing that held knowledge and could listen and answer.

Finally, in this regard the contexts where we find khipus today are also telling. Although khipus are at times recovered from the ruins of administrative storehouses^[18] and palaces^[19]—settings where one would naturally expect to find signs of record keeping—most often than not archaeologists encounter them in graves. But why? What I mean is, why take large tresses of cords out of an active administrative setting into a more or less inert burial? Are we to interpret all such khipu as mere grave goods or perhaps wills of the dead? It has after all been suggested that the khipus in open tombs may have been read and consulted as the last statements of dead ancestors by the living.^[20] Or, in light of the kamay-charged properties of the khipu along with their societal position, may we instead then start seeing them as something else? FitzPatrick recently discussed the ability of cords and khipus in graves “to act as bridges between the realms of the living and the dead”^[21], a symbolical, but also very much literal role which they appear to have fulfilled during consultations between the everliving ancestors and mortals. Pushing this character, I would suggest that if a khipu could live, I see no reason why it also could not die. After all, as the example of the living mummies shows, in the Andes life and death were inexorably interwoven. If so, after the animator of the cords, the enactor and the voice of the interactions inscribed in cloth, the khipukamayuq passed away, the most appropriate resting place for their knotted (but now muted) companions was beside them in the sands and burial chambers. In this sense, the very fact that the majority of the corpus was recovered from graves reinforces the idea that once khipus were in fact alive.

To kill a record

In light of all of this, I find myself facing a conundrum. As someone whose research involves sampling khipus for isotopic analysis to better understand the environments in which they were made and used, I am confronted with the fact that this work necessarily requires the removal and destruction of small portions of the khipu itself.^[22] In this sense, knowledge through disintegration can reveal dimensions of the object that remain inaccessible to morphological analysis alone.

This comes at a cost. From a curatorial standpoint, such interventions raise clear concerns about the preservation of a fragile and irreplaceable heritage. Yet khipus have also resisted decipherment for over a century, leading researchers to turn increasingly toward more minute and materially embedded forms of analysis. We have moved beyond mere knot structure and colour into fiber composition, asking what animal fibers might reveal,^[23] what pigments might encode^[24], and even what atomic signatures can tell us about chronology^[25] and space.^[26] At what point does the analysis of the khipus’ material components cease to be interpretation and become a conceptual transformation of the object itself? And what kinds of knowledge can only emerge through such acts?

A second dilemma follows from the argument developed above. If khipus are understood not as inert objects but as entities embedded in systems of social and cosmological relation, then what does it mean to remove part of one? Is this an act of harm or of engagement? Does sampling constitute a form of mutilation and potentially even murder or can it be understood as a different mode of contact? Even from my removed perspective, there is a sense of anthropomorphising at play here. I am, after all, rooting for the cooperation of modern machinery and some five-hundred-year-old rope. But where does this immersion lead us, where does it end and where should it end? If reciprocity matters, what, if anything, do I owe the khipu in return? It offers a part of its body, what do I sacrifice? In hopes that the analysis goes well, should I also bring a basket of offerings to the lab for what I would call good luck? Will the khipu revolt against me if I refuse to do so, strangling me to death? Thankfully, the principle of ‘an eye for an eye’ does not apply in an Andean context to my knowledge. Still, these reflections point toward a methodological crossroad: whether to suspend one’s usual assumptions about matter and accept, following Allen,^[27] a world in which all things may be imbued with agency, or instead adopt the kind of “modernist detachment” described by Bill Sillar.^[28]

Allen argues that engaging with objects beyond the assumption that they are inert, always holds within it the possibility of a response coming from the object being interacted with. Are we as khipu scholars missing out on a potential response, helpful for our quest of decipherment, if we refuse to engage with the khipu to this capacity?

Sampling location for water along the Cañete river. Its oxygen and hydrogen is what (we suspect) was ‘frozen’ into the khipu fragments seen on the image above (Photo by the author).

Intercommunication through isotopes

I do not yet have a definitive answer to these last questions. That being said, I do have a conclusion in the hopes of sparking conversation. As Brokaw put it, “decipherment invokes conjectural leaps of faith”.^[29] I believe then that there is no harm in toying with the idea of the living khipu, imagining or even conceptualizing how our approach would look if we were fully immersed in such Andean ways of sensing the world. In fact, I am positive that such a scientific study would engage with its object—or rather, its subject—of research to a degree and sensitivity otherwise not in reach through our conventional ways of knowledge collection. Indulging in these imaginative practices may just inform our conclusions from a novel viewpoint, that is very much worthy of consideration. In light of all of this, let me reframe my study through this perspective as an exercise, and see where it may lead us.

Isotopic research revolves around tracking the atomic signatures that the cotton or animal and human hair of the khipus incorporated from the environment as they grew and developed. Isotopes of strontium, an alkaline earth metal present in the rocks, carbon from the air, nitrogen of the soil as well as oxygen and hydrogen in the water form the tissues of the organisms that once bore these fibers. The analysis revolves around tracing back these specific isotopic signatures recorded within the khipu strands into the original feminine Inka earth and the masculine Andean water. Kamay-bearing mediums, some perhaps even wak’as, that once made up the living-breathing-eating social arena of the landscape. Recognizing this, isotopic analysis moves from the detached and rigid input of organic material into a mass spectrometer for the calculation of isotopic ratios, to the reconstruction or invocation of these environmental essences. In turn, we can look at isotopes as constituent parts of the source for the vitalizing power which the khipukamayuq embedded in their khipu. Moreover, we can conceptualize the isotopic analysis of khipu as a sort-of khipumancy (again, Salomon’s term), or more precisely, as khipukamay-mancy. A type of consultation with the khipu and its embedded essences to break the awkward silence between us and the cords.

Sampling, as a necessary part of this communicative process, can be reframed then as an act which leads not to the full destruction, but to the transformation of the cords into gas that can be measured for its isotopic ratio. At the end of the analysis, the combusted material re-enters the air and with it the cycle which brought it into the fabric of the khipu all those years ago. From an Andean perspective, such material transformation need not imply the loss and death of vitality or efficacy. As Thomas B. F. Cummins observes, in 16th-century Cusco the sacred sands, which were brought up all the way from the coast in Inka times to ornament the plaza of the Coricancha, were used as new building material for the Spanish cathedral. Although colonial authorities hoped this would dispel the natives’ continued veneration for the sands, they kept on paying respects to the walls of the cathedral now enriched with the coastal kamay. As Cummins writes, “within Andean logic, the aura of the sacred is not necessarily removed by the destruction of its visual form”^[30], while Carolyn Dean similarly adds that, “essence was transubstantial, and so its significance was independent of form.”^[31] In much the same way, the combustion of a minute sample during isotopic analysis need not be understood as the annihilation of the khipu's essence. Rather, the material changes state while remaining within the same cycles of matter and vitality that originally constituted it. Indeed, it is precisely through this transformation that a form of communication with the cord becomes possible. Especially in the case of fragmented khipus, whose individual cords have long been separated not only from their archaeological context but also from the larger ‘body’ of the knotted text, isotopic analysis may provide one of the few (though certainly not the only!^[32]) remaining means of accessing information preserved within the fibres themselves. The conversion of fiber into gas is therefore not the termination of the khipu’s vitality, but the medium through which its environmental memory and enduring kamay can once again be revived and consulted.

Ultimately, as has been wisely stated before^[33], materiality and chaîne opératoire are not secondary to khipu decipherment but are instead among its primary conditions of possibility. Meaning in khipus is distributed across the structure and context of the fiber. That is, how the khipu physically appears and how the physical space of it where relations between people, landscapes, and materials took place was shaped. I suggest that thinking with khipus as relational and potentially animate entities does not necessarily prohibit sampling. On the contrary, it in fact may reframe it for everyone’s benefit for the recovery of this type of information. Seen this way, decipherment is not the extraction of a hidden message from an inert artefact, but the reconstruction of a set of relations inscribed in matter through communication with a living object. Perhaps some of what the khipu encodes can only ever be understood by entering into this territory. Likewise, removing a fragment of fiber for analysis is not only an act of extraction, but also a form of encounter, a way of entering into contact with the material histories carried in the cords. In this sense, destructive isotopic analysis can be understood as a continuation of the relations already embedded in the object, tracing the lives of the fibers, the environments they passed through, and the human and non-human worlds they were entangled with.

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