Ancient Andean societal complexities tie knots in evolutionary understanding

 

 

IMAGE: TAWANTINSUYU—THE INKA IMPERIAL “FOURFOLD DOMAIN”—ENCOMPASSED ABOUT A MILLION SQUARE KILOMETERS AND A POPULATION OF SOME 10 MILLION INHABITANTS WITH DIFFERENT CULTURES AND LANGUAGES IN AN EXTREMELY DIVERSE LANDSCAPE. view more 

CREDIT: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL COMPUTING

Fiber tells the story of its being, each lock carrying the history of its curator, of its origin. Spun into thread, plied into yarn, woven into tapestries, the fiber arts are ancient and ubiquitous. For ancient Andean peoples, including Inkas, the craft appeared to be even more vital as an expansive means of data management and imperial rule — yet contemporary classifications overlook the sophisticated approach to sharing and controlling information, leading scholars to question the societal complexity of communities without what they consider written language.

 

Steven A. Wernke, associate professor and director of the Spatial Analysis Research Laboratory in the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, however, argues that, rather than an accurate representation of a less complex society, the oversight marks an incomplete and insensitive understanding of global diversity as it pertains to social, political, economic, and technological systems of ancient peoples. His explanation of the Inka writing system, as well as how such signals of complexity may be updated in modern data systems, was made available online ahead of its publication in the March edition of the Journal of Social Computing.  

 

“The Inkas and ancient Andean societies more generally have often played the role of ‘exceptions to the rule’ in global discussions of the development of social complexity,” Wernke said. “They are often pointed to as examples of the development of complex society ‘in the absence of’ writing, currency, markets, the wheel, iron and the like. In particular, the Inkas seemingly violate quantitative comparative models of the development of ancient empires because they seemed to lack key technologies for information management. This understanding is profoundly mistaken.”

 

In the study of human and societal evolution, scholars are trending toward favoring a threshold model of information processing. Societies grow, shifting the dynamics of interactions, how information is managed and shared changes — often through technological innovation — which allows further growth. In other words, empires are built on the ability to communicate with more and further dispersed people, typically through written language. This threshold model is evidenced by the field’s go-to data source Seshat, an extensive database systematically fed information on how human civilizations have evolved over time by researchers around the world.

 

“The Andean region appears to violate this model because the Seshat database records writing and other information processing technologies as absent in the case of the Inka empire,” Wernke said. “I argue that the dynamics of the Andean region are actually consistent with the information threshold model, but the data as constituted do not capture the relevant variables.”

 

The Inkas did not have written language as conventionally understood—that is, by graphic signs representing parts of speech. Instead, they let the fiber talk through the khipu. Arrangements of knotted cords, khipus could record simple accounting tasks or extravagant narratives.

 

“The Inkas did have a system of writing, through the khipu, a tactile fiber medium,” Wernke said, explaining the deep history of fiber arts as a means of technology and art for Andean people, from fabricating intricate textiles to elaborately braiding roof thatching. “Khipus emerged from this especially advanced domain of knowledge and technological advancement based on exquisitely attuned sensibilities to the affordances of fiber media. This highly complex knotted cord technology could record quantitative, qualitative and, optionally, linguistic data through encoding systems that we still only partially grasp.”

 

Similar to written language in other societies, and in accordance with the threshold model, khipu use exploded as the Inka empire expanded.

 

“During the Late Horizaon, from 1450 to 1532 CE, there was an unprecedented elaboration and standardization of their structural, visual and tactile properties, suggesting they were key innovations for information management associated with Inka imperial expansion,” Wernke said. Less than 20 pre-Inka khipus survived to modern day, but about 1,300 khipus with presumed Inka cultural affiliation — and much greater diversity of knot types, indicating a greater diversity of information recorded — persisted.

 

As khipu use exploded, so did the Inka empire. Starting in the mid-15th century, the road system eventually connected the two million square kilometers area of the Inka empire, with evidence of messengers transmitting khipus along the routes. According to Wernke, this implies a broad understanding of the language of khipus, even across the varied spoken languages during the Inka imperial rule, further calling into question the threshold model of writing as an index of social complexity only when it correlates to spoken language. He is continuing to map the road network and model movement through it at an empire-wide scale.

 

“Without the development of diverse systems of data registry, the achievements of the societies of the peoples of the Americas will not be adequately represented,” Wernke said. “This paper is an attempt to point out these shortcomings and point to how they can be corrected.”