Deciphering breakthrough - TAN but fascinating
June Samaras <[email protected]> Mon, 19 Aug 2019 14:00:14 -0400
| Newsgroups | gmane.education.classics |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <CA+zSR03vmJCX1_=mh40GnycRhY3kCvLdTST-1dMq_VZua_6jcA@mail.gmail.com> |
The College Student Who Decoded the Data Hidden in Inca KnotsManny Medrano
cut loose on spring break by analyzing a set of khipus.
Atlas Obscura <https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.atlasobscura.com%2F%3Futm_source%3Dpocket&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C17db3c6550ea4411ef8808d724cf2e03%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C637018344560284103&sdata=%2BTYN5sgxirTgcSMJSOx5gj%2FcvR79qg0itKUypQi%2BPTE%3D&reserved=0>|
- Katherine Davis-Young
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgetpocket.com%2Fedit%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fgetpocket.com%252Fexplore%252Fitem%252Fthe-college-student-who-decoded-the-data-hidden-in-inca-knots&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C17db3c6550ea4411ef8808d724cf2e03%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C637018344560284103&sdata=V4digSRTsURniL%2FdO%2Fpou6WYf4vWmoVq4IN20OIv6ro%3D&reserved=0>
-
<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fsharer%2Fsharer.php%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fgetpocket.com%252Fexplore%252Fitem%252Fthe-college-student-who-decoded-the-data-hidden-in-inca-knots%253Futm_source%253Dfbsynd%2526utm_medium%253Dsocial&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C17db3c6550ea4411ef8808d724cf2e03%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C637018344560284103&sdata=J%2BEG%2BazHjWBKzAq2%2BauHahAsNkqDeRTHONxFjtyUZZU%3D&reserved=0>
-
<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fintent%2Ftweet%3Ftext%3DThe%2520College%2520Student%2520Who%2520Decoded%2520the%2520Data%2520Hidden%2520in%2520Inca%2520Knots%2520-%2520Atlas%2520Obscura%2520-%2520Pocket%2520http%253A%252F%252Fgetpocket.com%252Fexplore%252Fitem%252Fthe-college-student-who-decoded-the-data-hidden-in-inca-knots%253Futm_source%253Dtwtrsynd%2526utm_medium%253Dsocial&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C17db3c6550ea4411ef8808d724cf2e03%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C637018344560284103&sdata=OoM5Uw1109eyeG0AGqxcn%2BBbEh7dLBkyNEf4pLU1kuE%3D&reserved=0>
-
<?to=%20&body=Manny%20Medrano%20cut%20loose%20on%20spring%20break%20by%20analyzing%20a%20set%20of%20khipus.%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fgetpocket.com%2Fexplore%2Fitem%2Fthe-college-student-who-decoded-the-data-hidden-in-inca-knots%3Futm_source%3Demailsynd%26utm_medium%3Dsocial%0ACheck%20out%20stories%20that%20have%20stood%20the%20test%20of%20time%2C%20and%20continue%20to%20be%20some%20of%20the%20most-saved%2C%20read%2C%20and%20shared%20stories%20on%20Pocket%3A%20https%3A%2F%2Fgetpocket.com%2Fexplore%2Fmust-reads&subject=The%20College%20Student%20Who%20Decoded%20the%20Data%20Hidden%20in%20Inca%20Knots%20-%20Atlas%20Obscura%20-%20Pocket>
[image: image.jpg]
*A model of khipu knots, representative of many khipus from pre- and
post-Conquest Peru. Photo from Jon Chase/ President and Fellows of Harvard
College*.
https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgetpocket.com%2Fexplore%2Fitem%2Fthe-college-student-who-decoded-the-data-hidden-in-inca-knots%3Futm_source%3Dpocket%26utm_medium%3Demail%26utm_campaign%3Dpockethits&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C17db3c6550ea4411ef8808d724cf2e03%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C637018344560284103&sdata=ZoRCFeSm7KUOUjki42zQb8MYCgLzddGMNZGKa681lCk%3D&reserved=0
There are many ways a college student might spend spring break. Making an
archaeological breakthrough is not usually one of them. In his first year
at Harvard, Manny Medrano did just that.
“There’s something in me, I can’t explain where it came from, but I love
the idea of digging around and trying to find secrets hidden from the
past,” Medrano says.
With the help of his professor, Gary Urton, a scholar of Pre-Columbian
studies, Medrano interpreted a set of six khipus, knotted cords used for
record keeping in the Inca Empire. By matching the khipus to a colonial-era
Spanish census document, Medrano and Urton uncovered the meaning of the
cords in greater detail than ever before. Their findings could contribute
to a better understanding of daily life in the Andean civilization.
[image: image.jpg]
*Manny Medrano (right), with guidance from Professor Gary Urton, has
decoded the meaning behind khipus, an Inca bookkeeping method of knotted
rope. Photo from Jon Chase/ President and Fellows of Harvard College*.
The Inca Empire reached its height of power in 15th- and 16th-century Peru.
When Spanish conquistadors invaded, the Inca had established the largest
and most complex society in the Americas. Architectural marvels from the
civilization, such as Machu Picchu
<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.atlasobscura.com%2Fplaces%2Fstonework-machu-picchu&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C17db3c6550ea4411ef8808d724cf2e03%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C637018344560284103&sdata=%2B7py%2F%2F3w0yaLPFrnyrC68vXRt3yt8tKw6rt5edFFCZ0%3D&reserved=0>, survive to
this day, but the Inca left behind no written records.
“The only sources we have at present are chronicles of the Inca that were
written by the Spaniards,” Urton says. “We know in a lot of cases those
histories were skewed by Spanish beliefs and Spanish motivations, and so we
don’t really have any indigenous Inca history.”
The only records the Inca are known to have kept are in the form of
intricately knotted khipu textiles. In 2002, Urton began Harvard’s Khipu
Database Project <https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fkhipukamayuq.fas.harvard.edu%2F&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C17db3c6550ea4411ef8808d724cf2e03%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C637018344560284103&sdata=y5M0U%2FctF%2BxgKMhnr8obfRCqfykPJquwu7J5BgmpYRU%3D&reserved=0>. He traveled to
museums and private collections around the world to record the numbers of
knots, lengths of cords, colors of fibers, and other distinguishing details
about every Inca khipu he could find—more than 900 in total.
Urton says he and other researchers in the field have always had a general
sense of what the khipus represented. Many, they could tell, had to do with
census data. Others appeared to be registers of goods or calendar systems.
But, until recently, none of the khipus Urton studied could be understood
on a very detailed level. If the khipus held messages or cultural
information beyond just numbers, the meanings were opaque to modern
scholars.
A turning point came when Urton began looking into a set of six khipus from
the 17th-century Santa River Valley region of Northwest Peru. One day,
Urton picked up a book and happened to spot a Spanish census document from
the same region and time period.
[image: image.jpg]
*Santa Valley in Peru. Photo by Miguel Vera León/ CC BY 2.0*.
“A lot of the numbers that were recorded in that census record matched
those six khipus exactly,” Urton says.
It was an exciting enough coincidence that Urton mentioned it to his
undergraduate students at the end of class in the spring of 2016. For
Medrano, who was sitting in the lecture hall that day, it was too enticing
of a lead to ignore.
“I walked up to him and said, ‘hey, spring break is coming up, if you need
someone to put a few hours into this, I’d be happy to take a look,’”
Medrano recalls.
Medrano, now a 21-year-old junior, was a freshman at the time. He is
majoring in economics, but had always found archaeology interesting and had
enrolled in Urton’s course on the Inca civilization, curious to study a
period of history about which he knew little.
Urton agreed to allow Medrano to look into the Santa Valley khipus and the
Spanish census. “[I wasn’t] thinking he’d ever do much with it because I’d
had one or two other people look at it before and nobody could ever come up
with anything,” Urton says.
The khipus in question are in a private collection in Peru, so Medrano
worked from information Urton had recorded in his khipu database. Medrano
recalls combing through spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel, graphing some of
the data, and enjoying the hunt for patterns.
“I have a love of puzzles, just for entertainment. I love to do a Sudoku on
a plane or something, but this is so much more profound,” he says.
[image: image.jpg]
*A khipu on display at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo by lynn
Dombrowski/ CC BY-SA 2.0*.
Medrano comes from a Mexican-American family and speaks Spanish, so
understanding the Spanish census document was no problem. Handling numbers
and data came naturally to him as well, as an economics major. The
challenge, as both Medrano and Urton note, seemed to demand a perfect
alignment of his skills and interests.
“Not every archaeology project operates in Excel,” Medrano points out.
Medrano noticed that the way each cord was tied onto the khipu seemed to
correspond to the social status of the 132 people recorded in the census
document. The colors of the strings also appeared to be related to the
people’s first names. The correlations seemed too strong to be a
coincidence. After spring break, Medrano told his professor about his
theories.
“I just remember being pretty excited, that, ‘Wow! I think the guy’s got
it,’” Urton says. “There were a couple of things that didn’t add up and I’d
point that out and he’d take it back and work on it for a week or two and
come back and he would have understood something about it at a deeper
level.”
Medrano worked with Urton over the next several months and the two compiled
their findings into a paper which will be published in the peer-reviewed
journal *Ethnohistory*
<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fethnohistory.org%2Findex.php%2Fjournal-of-ethnohistory%2F&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C17db3c6550ea4411ef8808d724cf2e03%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C637018344560284103&sdata=T7KqA3Ss%2Bug%2FWrAQ674%2B4ssRsJBUEqCmhYLpr61FXr8%3D&reserved=0> in January.
Medrano is the first author on the paper, indicating he contributed the
bulk of the research, something Urton notes is extremely rare for an
undergraduate student.
[image: image.jpg]
*A 15th-century khipu. Photo from the Public Domain*.
Sabine Hyland researches Andean anthropology at the University of St.
Andrews. She has read Medrano and Urton’s forthcoming paper and describes
their discoveries as “thrilling.”
“Manny has proven that the way in which pendant cords are tied to the top
cord indicates which social group an individual belonged to. This is the
first time anyone has shown that and it’s a big deal,” Hyland says.
Urton is now optimistic that the six khipus examined in the research could
serve as a key to decode the hundreds of others he has in his database. The
colors of the cords as they relate to first names could hint at the
meanings of colors in other khipus, for example.
“There’s a lot we can draw on from this one case,” Urton says.
But what’s most exciting to Urton and Medrano is the potential to better
understand Inca history from the indigenous point of view. As Medrano puts
it, “history has been written from the perspective of the conquerors and to
reverse that hierarchy is what I see this project as doing.”
This post originally appeared on Atlas Obscura and was published December
14, 2017. This article is republished here with permission.
Enjoy this story? Add wonder to your inbox.
--
June Samaras
KALAMOS BOOKS
(For Books about Greece)
2020 Old Station Rd
Streetsville,Ontario
Canada L5M 2V1
Tel : 905-542-1877
E-mail : [email protected]
https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=www.kalamosbooks.com&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C17db3c6550ea4411ef8808d724cf2e03%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C637018344560284103&sdata=MocbWr%2FKoCpBy8gYlBbeo2dOXQjKhJPFcCX%2F6LpiUFk%3D&reserved=0
https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fkalamosb.alibrisstore.com%2F&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C17db3c6550ea4411ef8808d724cf2e03%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C637018344560284103&sdata=x2sPw5pawV9InvimTVeWkPV%2BTjVfF52LkTrAJzRhZe8%3D&reserved=0
https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.antiqbook.com%2Fbooks%2Fbookseller.phtml%2Fkal&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C17db3c6550ea4411ef8808d724cf2e03%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C637018344560294101&sdata=7JeCJN%2B6a69jV3%2BmL%2FOuumuqXhvWhN2cpJCPidWqNY8%3D&reserved=0
<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.avg.com%2Femail-signature%3Futm_medium%3Demail%26utm_source%3Dlink%26utm_campaign%3Dsig-email%26utm_content%3Dwebmail&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C17db3c6550ea4411ef8808d724cf2e03%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C637018344560294101&sdata=BS8ysdvyOwk1A0pj8BkCH7Nff9L7IOnFPDzvVNi7Zso%3D&reserved=0>
Virus-free.
https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=www.avg.com&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C17db3c6550ea4411ef8808d724cf2e03%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C637018344560294101&sdata=R9lgMP3HJrTZHG0wH7Ag5dyjj6nTY1XP0qvJbBKdabo%3D&reserved=0
<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.avg.com%2Femail-signature%3Futm_medium%3Demail%26utm_source%3Dlink%26utm_campaign%3Dsig-email%26utm_content%3Dwebmail&data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C17db3c6550ea4411ef8808d724cf2e03%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C637018344560294101&sdata=BS8ysdvyOwk1A0pj8BkCH7Nff9L7IOnFPDzvVNi7Zso%3D&reserved=0>
<#m_2324928247191612399_DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
--
June Samaras
2020 Old Station Rd
Streetsville,Ontario
Canada L5M 2V1
Tel : 905-542-1877
E-mail : [email protected]