Oil on Cardboard 53.4x37.2cm

This Inca idol depicts the Quipu recording devices fashioned from strings historically used by a number of cultures in the region of Andean South America. A quipu usually consisted of camelid fiber strings. The Inca people used them for collecting data and keeping records, monitoring tax obligations, collecting census records, calendrical information, and for military organization. The cords stored numeric and other values encoded as knots, often in a base ten positional system. A quipu could have only a few or thousands of cords. The configuration of the quipus has been compared to string mops. Archaeological evidence has also shown the use of finely carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps sturdier, base to which the color-coded cords. This form of a physical writing language is echoed in the hallucinogenic layered blue crop platforms which you see in the sacred valley. Recording and categorising food stuffs was of the upmost important to the incas.