Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu

6. String Registries: Native Accounting and Memory According to the Colonial Sources

String Registries S I X Native Accounting and Memory According to the Colonial Sources Carlos Sempat Assadourian The present chapter,1 based on the Spanish chronicles and other colonial documents, represents an introduction to the types of accounting registers devised by Andean societies, as well as to the new uses to which they were put at the time of the European conquest of the New World. The analysis is very straightforward in the case of the khipu used for accounting purposes, but it is more complex and daring in relation to those khipu that served to register historical and literary narratives. It is both important and feasible to investigate more thoroughly the disappearance of the memory khipu following the European invasion (as well as the disappearance of that part of what was remembered that was inculcated by means of the songs). Within this secular process there appears the question of the Jesuits, who were particularly concerned with khipu. In addition to looking for new discoveries in the archives, we can accomplish a series of reevaluations in relation to certain published sources, which all, I think, come from the same origin: the research of Blas Valera. An analysis of the works of the anonymous Jesuit (almost certainly Blas Valera), Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Anello Oliva, and Fernando de Montesinos will give us valuable knowledge about the continuity, or reconstruction, of Andean memory through its ancient recording techniques. This approach will also permit us to compare and contrast this form of record keeping with the strictly oral memory incorporated in judicial investigations and judgments and with the colonial memory represented by Guaman Poma, both for its conceptual nature as well as for its significance with respect to alphabetic writing, whether in Spanish or in Quechua. 1 2 0 Carlos Sempat Assadourian Published in Amberes in 1555, the book written by the accountant Agustín de Zárate informed Europe of the accounting instrument employed by the Indian nations ruled by the Inka:2 One must presuppose the difficulty that exists in the investigation because the natives don’t use any kind of letters or writing, nor do they even use pictures such as those that serve as books in New Spain; they only use memory which they pass on from one to another. And important matters are preserved with the help of some cotton strings that the Indians call quipos, denoting the numbers by differently tied knots, going up along the space of the string from the units to the tens and higher, and using strings of different colors according to what they want to show. And in each province there are people that are in charge of remembering by these strings general things, whom they call Quipucamayos. And so there can be found public houses full of these strings, which are easily interpreted by the person in charge of them, even though they are many ages older than he is.3 Zárate was mistaken in restricting the material from which the khipu were fashioned to cotton, perhaps because his direct observations were limited to the coast, where this material was commonly used; he was also ambiguous in reference to the preservation of the past by means of oral memory. As his descriptions are limited to only one type of khipu, the rest of the details in his account are correct: the khipu was a registry of accounts made of string with meaning partially signaled by color; it was an object in which numbers were represented by means of distinctive types of knots and the knots of higher value were placed toward the top; and it was an object whose control and storage were the responsibility of a specialized administrative bureaucracy. In that early colonial decade of the 1550s, an early death kept Cieza de León from publishing the second part of his Crónica del Perú, which included his notes on khipu.4 Cieza distinguished between the way the historical memory of the government of each Inka was maintained in its oral reproduction and the support for that memory derived from accounting techniques: ‘‘and the expenditures and contributions of the provinces were recorded in the khipu, in order that they should know what they gave and contributed when the ruler was dead and his successor reigned.’’5 Cieza emphasized in particular the use of khipu to keep track of tribute accounts and population censuses, and the ways in which both related to centralized government...