Quipucamayacs

=Quipucamayacs=



A quipucamayac was the Incan record keeper, or accountant, who was in charge of making and reading to quipu knots. They kept track of a number of things, such as mit'a labor, taxes, and took censuses. During the Spanish Conquest, quipucamayacs were brought into court to settle land and tribute disputes, because their record keeping was considered valid legal documentation. According to Ascher, “...the quipumaker shared with Sumerian scribe, the Egyptian, and indeed with all scribes in the formative periods of civilizations, these three things: (1) a general recording system; (2) contents, namely political arithmetic (they worked for the state); and (3) a setting where recording involved saying/hearing as well as seeing/touching”(Ascher 78). It is a form of independent invention, and other cultures around the world have used similar mnemonic devices of communication.



In addition to the quipu, Lydia Fossa theorized that the quipucamayac used additional instruments to assist them in any computations that were required when the quipu recorded numerical information about taxes. "Khipukamayuq used a second accounting instrument to carry out their computations: they had a series of tokens with which to perform the arithmetic operations of division or subtraction and multiplication or addition required to obtain the subtotals and the grand totals. It is still unknown by what mechanisms they obtained their results"(Fossa 11). In this case, some quipu may have been records solely for numerical information, and a basis for completing necessary mathmatical calculations. Other researchers have theorized about the mathmatical properties of the quipu as well.