Archaeologists excavating the 15th century Inca archaeological site of Incahuasi, about 90 miles southeast of Lima and 20 miles inland from the coast of central Peru, have found 25 quipu , groups of knotted and dyed strings tied together that were used by the Inca for keeping records.
The quipu are in various shapes, sizes and configurations. The longest is two groups of strings tied together to form a row three feet wide, with an additional tail in the center where the two strands meet. The smallest is just a few inches wide, the size of a small notepad. They aided in data collection and record-keeping, including the monitoring of tax obligations, census records, calendrical information, and military organization.
The cords contained numeric and other values encoded on knots in a base positional system. Some quipu had as many as 2, cords. In widespread use for years or so in cultures that had no written language, the quipu were targeted for destruction by the Spanish conquistadors.
They were collected and burned. Today only a few hundred have survived because they were used as grave goods. Ceramic pots recovered from the warehouses are marked with symbols for maize and other crops.
He called it New Cusco, after the Inca capital, and planned the city to be a smaller scale replica of the original. The architecture was therefore deliberately grand, meant to convey imperial power. The climate is dry, a sub-tropical desert, which required the construction of canals and irrigation systems to enable agriculture.
