Some of the knots did survive, though, and for centuries people wondered if
the old man had been speaking the truth. Then, in 1923, an anthropologist named
Leland Locke provided an answer: The khipu were files. Each knot represented a
different number, arranged in a decimal system, and each bundle likely held
census data or summarized the contents of storehouses. Roughly a third of the
existing khipu don't follow the rules Locke identified, but he speculated that
these "anomalous" khipu served some ceremonial or other function. The mystery
was considered more or less solved.
Then, in the early 1990s, Urton, one of the world's leading Inca scholars,
spotted several details that convinced him the khipu contained much more than
tallies of llama sales. For example, some knots are tied right over left, others
left over right. Urton came to think that this information must signal
something. Could the knotted strings also be a form of writing? In 2003, Urton
wrote a book outlining his theory, and in 2005 he published a paper in
Science that showed how even khipu that follow Locke's rules could
include place-names as well as numbers.
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