Frank Salomon
National Endowment for the Humanities
Resident Scholar 1998-1999
The Romance of the Precise
In 1994, a schoolteacher from the high-Andean village of Tupicocha in central
Peru urged Frank Salomon to visit his hometown and see its equipos (Spanish
for "teams"). "I thought he was talking about soccer teams," Salomon
recalls. Instead, he meant the objects archaeologists call khipus:
knotted-cord records made by Andean peoples from Middle Horizon times (600-1000
C.E.) onward. Tupicocha's nine khipus are held as sacred patrimony by eight
of the ten corporate descent groups, called ayllus, and are displayed
in annual civic rites.
The descent groups who own khipus are the same ones whose
mythology fills the only Quechua-language book on Andean belief written in the
early colony, a source Salomon translated with George Urioste and published in
1991. Because of Tupicocha's peculiarly rich relation to the written record,
Salomon felt it was a very special place to find khipus. "This province
isn't just any patch of the Andes; it means as much to Andean scholars as the
island of Ithaca might mean to Classicists. Second only to the Inca capital of
Cuzco, this is the place where our knowledge of Andean culture has real time
depth," Salomon explained.
The Tupicocha khipus, known to postdate 1650 through radiocarbon
dating, are a unique clue to the persistence of non-alphabetic systems of complex
recording far into the era when the written word had achieved solid dominance
under Spanish rule. Supported by the National Science Foundation and Wenner Gren
in 1994-1997, Salomon studied how and why South America's most notable "writing
without words" endured alongside the alphabetic record.
Although today nobody claims the ability to read the khipus,
those in Tupicocha offer a unique opportunity for researchers because they are
the only known case of khipus functioning as political charters of a living social
organization. "While Tupicochans do not now make khipus, they do make other
kinds of non alphabetic signs, particularly the unique code carved on their staffs
of office," Salomon commented. One fruit of his term at SAR is the first
clear model of "how a 'writing without words' actually works." The
villagers also continue to carry on the institutional proceedings khipus once
recorded, providing functional clues to how khipus worked as a collective record.
By working with village officers and artisans during two fieldwork
seasons, Salomon compiled a wide variety of data bases, including a knot-by-knot
registry of the specimens, and khipu terminology that might reflect lore inherited
from the prehispanic art. He observed how khipus are handled in community work,
ritual, and meetings, and he conducted interviews on how the descent groups,
or ayllus, function in politics, production, and ritual. Sometimes working by
candlelight, Salomon scrutinized the internal records of the ayllus, and documented
oral traditions about the village's past and its sacred places.
Salomon's book, tentatively titled The Romance of
the Precise: Andean Media and the Advent of the Alphabet, is built around
the concept of the Andean village as an intellectual community. He believes that
understanding the coexistence of the alphabet with Andean media, which are completely
different in principle from Old World writings, will "help us understand
just how varied are the 'technologies of intellect' through which peoples interpret
and record their experience and reason out their social agendas.
Up to now, specialists in the history of writing have tended
to shrug off systems which do not employ the "glottographic" principle,
Salomon said, "that is, the principle of using visible symbols to stand
for speech sounds. In Tupicocha, it is possible to trace the way in which villagers
carried over from the Inca age a rich cord-based data technology particularly
useful for doing the kind of work we do today with spreadsheets, and combined
it with the glottographic writing of Europe. How they did so is demonstrated
in village archives - hundreds of volumes accumulated while planning around stringent
constraints of water supply, labor power, agro-pastoral cycles, and politico-ritual
calendar."
Salomon's work examines the possibility that khipus moved
toward flexible nonverbal schematics, a "deck" of periodically updated
social symbols with which to play out possible "games" of resource
use, or to record "rounds" already accomplished.
Read
more about Dr. Salomon's research.
Affiliation at time of award: Professor of Anthropology,
University of Wisconsin
Return to Resident Scholars 1998-1999.
