Inca mystery ties scholars in knots

The route to this village 13,000ft above sea level runs from the desert coast up hairpin bends, delivering the mix of exhilaration and terror that Andean roads often provide. Condors soar above mist-shrouded crags. Quechua-speaking herders squint at strangers who arrive gasping in the thin air.

But Rapaz's isolation has allowed it to guard an enduring archaeological mystery: a collection of khipus, the cryptic woven knots that may explain how the Incas — in contrast to contemporaries in the Ottoman Empire and China's Ming dynasty — ruled a vast, complex empire without a written language.

Archaeologists now attempting to decipher the code say the Incas, brought down by the Spanish conquest, used khipus - strands of woollen cords made from the hair of animals such as llamas or alpacas - as an alternative to writing. The practice may have allowed them to share information from what is now southern Colombia to northern Chile.

Few of the world's so-called lost writings have proved as daunting to decipher, scholars say. Researchers at Harvard have been using databases and mathematical models in recent efforts to understand the khipu (pronounced Kee-poo), which means knot in Quechua, the Inca language still spoken by millions in the Andes.

Only about 600 khipus are thought to survive. Collectors spirited many away from Peru decades ago, including a collection of about 300 held at Berlin's Ethnological Museum. Most were thought to have been destroyed after Spanish officials decreed them to be idolatrous in 1583.

But Rapaz, home to about 500 people who subsist by herding llamas and cattle and farming crops like rye, offers a rare glimpse into the role of khipus during the Inca Empire and long afterward. The village houses one of the last-known khipu collections still in ritual use. "I feel my ancestors talking to me when I look at our khipu," said Marcelina Gallardo, 48, a herder who lives with her children here in the puna, the Andean region above the tree line where temperatures drop below freezing at night and carnivores like the puma prey on herds.

"The khipu is a jewel of our life in this place," she said.

Even here, no-one claims to understand the knowledge encoded in the village's khipus, which are guarded in a ceremonial house called a Kaha Wayi. The khipus' intricate braids are decorated with knots and tiny figurines, some of which hold even tinier bags filled with coca leaves.

The ability of Rapacinos, as the villagers are called, to decipher their khipus seems to have faded with elders who died long ago, though scholars say the village's use of khipus may have continued into the 19th century.Testing tends to show dates for Rapaz's khipus that are well beyond the vanquishing of the Incas, and experts say they differ greatly from Inca-designed khipus. Even now, Rapacinos conduct rituals in the Kaha Wayi beside their khipus, as described by Frank Salomon, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin who led a recent project to help Rapaz protect its khipus in an earthquake-resistant casing.

One tradition requires the villagers to murmur invocations during the night to the deified mountains surrounding Rapaz, asking for the clouds to let forth rain. Then they peer into burning llama fat and read how its sparks fly, before sacrificing a guinea pig and nestling it in a hole with flowers and coca.

The survival of such rituals, and of Rapaz's khipus, testifies to the village's resilience after centuries of hardship. Fading murals on the walls of Rapaz's colonial church depict devils pulling Indians into the flames of hell for their sins. Feudal landholding families forced the ancestors of many here into coerced labour.

But throughout it all, perhaps because of the village's high level of cohesion and communal ownership of land and herds, Rapacinos somehow preserved their khipus in their Kaha Wayi. "They feel that they must protect the khipu collection for the same reason we feel that we have to defend the physical original of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution," Professor Salomon said. "I've heard people say, 'It's our Constitution, it's our Magna Carta.'"

The most immediate threat to the khipus may be from Rapaz's tilt toward Protestantism, a trend throughout Latin America. About 20 percent of Rapacino families already belong to new Protestant congregations, which view rituals near the khipus as pagan.

Far from Rapaz, meanwhile, the pursuit to decipher khipus faces its own challenges. Scholars say they lack the equivalent for khipus of a Rosetta Stone, the granite slab in Greek used to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Yet if a full understanding of the khipus remains elusive, in Rapaz villagers nonetheless guard them as totems of a crumbled civilisation. "They must remain here, because they belong to our people," said Fidencio Alejo Falcn, 42. "We will never surrender them."