The Tension between Standardization and Regionalism in Cord-Keeping in Tawantinsuyu

Summary

Studies of the extant corpus of some 1,000 khipus from different regions around the former territory of the Inka Empire – Tawantinsuyu – show evidence of contradictory forces at work in terms of the forms and degree of standardization of recording structures and techniques. While, on one hand, there are marked differences in certain features of khipus from one region to the next throughout the empire, there are, on the other hand, notable similarities in other features. This paper examines the similarities and differences in khipus from archives around the empire – from the far north of Peru to northern Chile – to address the question of how cord-keeping represented a field of cultural and administrative practices that served state interests in the surveillance and control of subject populations in Tawantinsuyu.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 18788