The site of Inkawasi (or Incahuasi) is located in the Cahete Valley, on the south coast of Peru. It was a major garrison and storage facility for the Inka expansion onto the south coast, built for housing and provisioning troops in the Inka assault on the Huarco peoples. Archaeological excavations of the storage facility have exposed what is to date a collection of 34 khipus (or quipus), the Inka knotted-string recording devices. We first explain why we consider the collection to constitute an “archive” and what the implications of that classification are for considering the significance of such a large collection of accounting devices associated with state storage. Several of the khipus were found associated with, or covered by, aji (Capsicum sp.), peanuts (Arachis hypogaea), and black beans (Phaseolus vulgaris). We suggest that these may be the products that the khipus recorded. Several khipus were tied together, and two sets of tied, paired samples are shown to contain very similar quantitative records. Close study of the paired samples, as well as the numerical values knotted into several other khipus, reveal different strategies that were being used by the khipu-keepers to maintain “checks-and-balances” accounting. Evidence was also found of possible standardized accounting units for agricultural produce brought to Inkawasi. These took the form of a grid-like array of squares produced by impressing ropes into the floors of two rectangular sorting spaces in the storage complex. The grid-work of squares may have served in the process of spreading out the produce on the floor and collecting and accounting for these products in standardized units. We conclude with reflections on how the processes, procedures, and routines of accounting observed at Inkawasi provide information for approaching the writing of an autochthonous history of the Inka state based on the study of accounting practices.
Several khipus—Inka knotted-string recording devices—were recently excavated at a storage facility at the Peruvian south coast site of Inkawasi, found buried under agricultural produce (i.e., chili peppers, peanuts, and black beans). These khipus contain a formulaic arrangement of numerical values not encountered on khipus from elsewhere in Tawantinsuyu (the Inka Empire). The formula includes first, a large number, hypothesized to record the sum total of produce included in a deposit, followed by a “fixed number,” and then one or more additional numbers. The fixed number plus the additional number(s) sum to the original large number. It is hypothesized that the fixed number represents an amount deducted from the deposit to support storage facility personnel. As such, it represented a tax assessed on deposits, the first evidence we have for a system of taxation on goods in the Inka Empire. It is proposed that the size and complexity of the storage facility at Inkawasi prompted the “invention” of a kind of financing instrument—taxation—not known previously from Inka administration. We also consider, but provisionally set aside, the alternative hypothesis that the fixed values recorded on the Inkawasi khipus could have represented amounts of seeds set aside from deposits for the next year's planting.
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