 and thank you for joining us. My name is Margo Koen, Mr. Rucci, and I'm the coordinator of public programs here at the Brooklyn Museum. I think we have enough seats. Feel free to take some of the seats in the front. Welcome to First Saturday, our monthly free celebration of art and community. Founded in 1998, First Saturday turns 20 this year. And before we begin our program, I would like to take a moment to thank you, longtime visitors at the museum, folks who are new to First Saturday, and everyone in between, for making this evening of art, scholarly conversation, live music, and film, into the joyous event that it's become. It is my pleasure to introduce tonight's conversation between the brilliant artists Cecilia Bagunia and scholar Gary Urdam, presented in conjunction with our special exhibition, Cecilia Bagunia, Disappeared Kipu, on view downstairs in our first floor galleries. Cecilia Bagunia is a New York-based, Chilean artist and poet who has devoted a significant part of her artistic practice to studying, interpreting, and reactivating Kipus, complex record-keeping devices made of knotted cords that have served as an essential medium for reading and writing, registering, and remembering. Drawing on her Indigenous heritage, Bagunia channels this sensorial mode of communication into immersive installations and participatory performances. It was my great pleasure to work with her quite recently on a performance which was enchanting for all of the visitors who were able to participate in it. Gary Urdam is the Dunbart and Oaks professor of pre-Columbian studies in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard. His research focuses on a variety of topics in pre-Columbian and early colonial and anti-culture and intellectual history. Drawing on materials and methods and archaeology, ethno-history, and ethnology, he's the author of many articles and of numerous books, far too many to count, and edited volumes on anti-anarchic cultures and inque civilization. His books include At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky, The History of a Myth, The Social Life of Numbers, Inca Myths, Signs of the Inca Kippu, and Inca History and Nantes, reading Kippus as primary sources. A former MacArthur Fellow and recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014 and 15, Urdam is the founder and director of the Harvard Kippu Database Project. Without further ado, I'd like to pass the microphone to Liz Munsell, the Lorraine and Alan Bresler Curator of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. We'll share a little bit more about the exhibition. Hi everyone, welcome. It's such a pleasure to see you all here tonight to celebrate Cecilia Vicunia, Disappeared Kippu, the exhibition that's downstairs in the Great Hall. Following the talk with Cecilia and Gary, I will be leading a gallery walkthrough at 7.30, so please do not miss that. I want to welcome you and introduce Cecilia and Gary this evening on behalf of myself and Catherine Morris, the Sackler Senior Curator for Peminist Art, who could not be with us this evening, sadly, but she is with us in spirit. The exhibition downstairs, Disappeared Kippu, is one small part of Cecilia Vicunia's decade-long exploration of these amazing ancient Inkin objects, the Kippu. It's a small but significant part, I hope, as you will see downstairs, and it's really been made possible through the partnership with Brooklyn Museum and the MFA Boston, where I work as well as through consultation with Gary Urton who approaches the Kippu from the perspective of an art historian and an archeologist, really a scientist, sometimes approaching them through computational means certainly scientific means and Cecilia approaches them through a ritualistic very spiritual and corporeal sense that is quite different than Gary's approach, but both have dedicated much of their careers to the uncovering of many of the mysteries that are embodied by these objects. So tonight is a great pleasure that I think we will hear them come to these incredible objects from two very different perspectives. So thank you all for joining us and thank you Cecilia and Gary. So first I wanted to begin by what is happening to us here in the US not only in New York and it has to do with the disappearance of things that we love and so I decided to call this exhibition the Disappeared Kippu not only in remembrance of the culture of solidarity, the communal culture that was destroyed in Chile with the military coup of September 11, 1973 but also with the destruction of an ancient tradition that is so unique in the planet as the Kippu. And so as I was thinking of what I wanted to say today of course we were all watching what is happening with the choice of the new member of the Supreme Court and I thought my god if we go the way it appears we are going this will be the disappearance of the US as we know it the disappearance perhaps of the rule of law the disappearance of the rights of women and peoples and all forms of difference and so I wanted to dedicate this conversation because I have the most profound admiration for Gary Orton I have been reading him since I think he published his book and to read is not really justice to what I do I read and read and read backwards and forward a thousand times if necessary and I always tell him I read certain paragraphs and this is because he has dedicated 25 years to the most dedicated and most in Spanish we say in English most meticulous dedication to understanding the twists and turns of which these majestic creatures the Kippus are composed so first I wanted to thank you very much Cecilia so you didn't hear anything wait wait wait it could be a little longer so I can say some of the things later thank you very much Cecilia very kind of you very generous of you I just want to say to begin with that I am extremely pleased in honor to have the opportunity to sit here this evening and have a conversation with Cecilia we have known each other for a very long time we in general known each other from a distance Cecilia from the distance of Chile myself from here in the US where we crossed in the night here or there at this conference or that conference of this museum or that museum but I have long been an admirer of her work as Cecilia mentioned I have been working studying the Kippus for something like 25 years or so and I became aware of the work that Cecilia was doing the art she was producing inspired by Kippus some probably 20 years ago or so I am not sure when those started but quite some time ago and have always admired them and I have always also wondered how to frame my own thinking about what I understand and what I think is significant about the relationship between all those old Kippus that I have been studying for so many years and all those museums in Europe and the US and primarily in Peru and Chile these magnificent new extraordinarily creative works of art that Cecilia is creating I just would say that I today is the first time I have actually had an opportunity to see one of her works in vivo like live and I went downstairs into the great hall and saw this magnificent object that she produced I mean she built a she built a cathedral out of a Kippus and it is just a magnificent object and just leaves me in complete awe with the creativity the conception and just I think also the love of those objects and to create something completely new that's grounded in them but that then goes off to almost another world so maybe I'll say like just maybe three minutes about the Kippus so these are these record keeping devices that the Inc. is used for primarily for recording administrative information they recorded censuses tribute resources in state store houses etc they are the only one of the ancient civilizations of the ancient world so we're talking about Mesopotamia Egypt, India, China, the Maya the Aztecs the Incas are the only high civilization that did not invent a system of writing but they had an empire that stretched for 5000 kilometers along the west coast of South America it was the largest empire in the new world they had standing armies they had kings, they had courts they had laws, they had all of this but there were certain things they didn't have number one the wheel and if you've ever been to the Andes you know why you don't necessarily need wheels because they don't get you very far but the second thing they didn't have was they didn't have writing and as an empire that tried to hold together some 9 million people stretched over some 9,000 kilometers or so 5000 kilometers it's that was an extraordinary challenge it was a highly multi-ethnic, multi-lingual population so that's probably one reason they didn't invent a system of writing linked to a specific language as was true of all those other writing systems they're all linked to a language whether Sumerian or Chinese or Mayan or whatever but rather they the system of record keeping they invented with these Kippus and not at courts was one that allowed them very efficiently to produce documents displaying quantitative data on all of those matters of state as well as recording in some way the identities of those and so that's half were up to what they were doing the other half of what they were doing were told by the Spaniards is that they recorded their myths their histories, their songs, their poems and that's an area of Kippu work that still is just a complete cipher for, certainly for me and I think it's fair to say for most people who are interested in the Kippus and studying the Kippus so perhaps we can a little bit later talk about ideas that I and various other people have about how they might have been using these devices of thread and knot and color and number in some way to record information that might be interpreted by knowledgeable people to generate or to produce myths and various other kinds of narratives so but I think that my fascination with Cecilia's work is that Cecilia's work seems to me to be a work that's firmly grounded in the realities of the Kippu the old Kippus but brings to it sensibilities that I think actually the only person in the world maybe who knows how to translate and decipher the Kippus is Cecilia Pecunia and so I would leave it to you perhaps to say more about what your hopes and intentions were producing this art Yes, I could start by writing a work that Gary used, he used the word love that the only thing that keeps you doing something that is utterly ridiculous and impossible like deciphering something that may never be deciphered is what has kept him going and also is what has kept me going and so it seems to me when I think for example in the newest book by Gary which is Inka History in other words he has written about this knot as history and that is a huge step because most people have forgotten that word that we use for history which is based on the Greek histos histos also means web so the notion that historical narrative is a weaving is deeply associated with the web of life with the idea that keeping records, keeping memory is something that benefits life and the continuity of life and for those who didn't hear me what I said in the beginning is that we are in front of the disappeared Kippu theoretically here even though it's downstairs just as we are in front of the disappearance not only of the species but probably of democracy as we've known it of people's rights we are facing the disappearance of everything that we love and the only way that we're going to turn around this is through that love and I would say that the work that I have done started when I was a little girl I was a baby girl not baby but that's how I don't know how to translate I was let's see in the year 54 I was 6 years old when an Inga Mami Kapakosha child that had been sacrificed in front of the mountain at which foot I lived was discovered this was the first sacrificed Inga child and shortly after that the miners who found him sold him as an object to the National History Museum so the school children such as myself were taken to visit the object you can imagine the shock of the little girl by the time they took me to the museum I figured I was 8 maybe and this boy was exactly my age he was exactly my size his hair looked like a girl's hair because he had lots of little braids and I immediately felt that could be me and so this field of love that seems to involve both the scholars and the artists that relate to the Kippu is an engagement with a form of knowledge that is beyond the rational because it includes the rational but it also refers to other spheres and getting back to the image of the first page of the new book by Gary he tells the story of how he discovered the Kippu and if you don't want to tell me I would like to tell it do you mean the embarrassing story? the one where you encountered the Kippu object for the first time in Dumbarton Oaks the first time I really was aware of being in the presence of one of these things was in a at a meeting at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC someone had brought a Kippu to this meeting and the meeting was in this dark oak panel a library at Dumbarton Oaks and I remember they had propped it up in front of a window so that the one sunlight the wintery sunlight came in and struck the Kippu and I remember just being attracted to it this was just the most remarkable object that I had ever seen it was such an intricate and delicate thing I think that's one sense that I've always had about them and I do invite you although the presence and the magnificence Cecilia's artwork downstairs fills the room located around it on two sides there are three, four beautiful Kippus in the Brooklyn Museum collection and these are really magnificent examples they're ones that we think are probably used for we're probably used for recording different types of information but there will be more to be said about that when we go down I guess I would just maybe in this intimate setting here also tell the second story that I tell in the prologue to my book so I spend my life now basically except for administration teaching studying knots and I when I was growing up in New Mexico I was in the Boy Scouts and this was when I was eight or nine years old and I was in the Boy Scouts, I was very excited about like being an equal scout one day and suddenly at a certain point we were doing an activity that just completely defeated me and frustrated me so immensely and I dropped out of Boy Scouts and that was tying knots and in truth I didn't remember that until I'd been studying Kippus for about ten years and I was in the basement in the storage room in Berlin and I've been working there for weeks studying the knots to measure every one of them and the distance from this knot to that knot and record this color and that color and material differences etc and it just suddenly struck me my god man you're doing the thing that profoundly defeated you when you were like eight years old so I mean I'm not sure what that story means but I sort of came around to it in an entirely unanticipated way I mean I think there's something for me personally in that that there was something just in terms of my own psychology and makeup I'm very attracted to these things and I've had a wonderful time studying them and I look forward actually now to learning more about them coming at them through Cecilia's eyes because I really do think she gives us a new way to look at the keepers and to think about them and so well I would venture an interpretation of your story now hearing you is quite different from reading it in the sense that suddenly your defeat as a child became a knot the defeat itself became a knot look at this when we are defeated we cannot translate to the disappearance of our rights when we are defeated that entices you somehow in a mysterious way that we do not understand and I think the presence and the admission the acknowledgement of what we don't understand is what makes art really powerful is what makes us be human and because if we don't live in that space knowing that we don't know something profound is missing and we cease to be complex humans we are dehumanized by the idea that we know something we become for example arrogant we become violent and very dangerous to life itself now how I understand the knot the knot for me is one of the great metaphors of the world mathematicians say that the knot is the most complex mathematical object that exists because it involves perhaps thousands of dimensions and this is such an amazing idea from the perspective of what it means to me I suddenly realized that but I will come back to how I see to tell you how I think not to how I see it in the early days when I had just arrived in New York I encountered a book by a team of brother and sister Robert and Celia Asher mathematicians who wrote this extraordinary book called The Code of the Kipu and it was reading this book that I encountered this little paragraph that I believe changed my understanding of the word Kipu but the word itself and she says something like in passing like the person, the Kipu Kamayok that means this in Quechua the maker of the Kipu really means the one that breathes life into the knot Kamayok is from Kamai the world to Greece so Kipu so the person that speaks with the knot is breathing life into the knot so she says that the imagination of this Kipu Kamayok comes from a tactile sensitivity and she goes further to say a tactile sensitivity that allows them to think in a space I have been doing poetry in a space according to my own definition for a lifetime many many decades before reading that so I read that and I say yes that's exactly it we perceive especially and she says the Kipu Kamayok is configuring a space completely real and she says this sensitivity comes from the unborn child so I picture wow this idea that you meaning each one of us is inside the womb of our mother playing with this cord what else do we have to do there you see we have this umbilical cord we touch it around we are tactile beings nothing is more human and more beautiful than that activity so that came in the perspective maybe this is an invention of women who are the masters of tactile inventions it is women so the role as in all cultures the Indian culture is not very different from that the creative role of the mother the creative role of the woman is always so soon forgotten erased so I thought what a wonderful thing that the mathematician could perceive that way constructing my kippus as a cosmic umbilical cord I just like to pick up on that idea of the mother and the womb and the relationship to mathematics I spent a year studying in a village in Bolivia in a village of weavers in Bolivia and the reason I had gone there was just at the beginning of the time I determined that I was going to start directly studying kippus and spend a good deal of time on it so I felt that kippus are made out of thread and they are about colors and numbers so who knows about that and of course weavers know about that so I got a grant and went to central Bolivia and were primarily in a village in Calilaria the interesting thing is is that the master weavers are all women and those women are all called mamas so mama is the title of a master weaver and it's used in the vernacular and informally to refer to mothers well but formally mama is a weaver and mama is also the origin of mathematics because women are the weavers every day when they're working with cords when they're warping when they're doing the complementary warp weaving where they push threads up and push threads down in this very complicated process of producing the weavings they are like implicitly intuitively working with mathematical phenomena with sets and with various magnitudes and translating those into the kipus so I mean I think there is an extraordinary body of knowledge that we've not really sort of plumb the depth of it really come to understand entirely clearly not just say to add to that I think getting to that point where we might be able to understand it better could be extraordinarily important the thing that is that I have found most difficult to communicate about the kipus and the aspect of them that I find most profound that part that I dealing with which I'm normally dealing with with a more routine boring administrative kipus is that we can like read them today the the knots on the majority of kipus so about three fourths to four fifths of the kipu are organized in tiers and those are tiers that are linked to a decimal place value system of a recording quantitative value so knots at the bottom are ones and then above that are the tens the hundreds and thousands etc and so once you know that trick once you know what I just told you you can now read like you say them every kipu that's out there but the interesting thing is that you would do it as I would you would probably like read the numerical values on a kipu then you would write it down in Hindu Arabic numerals the numerals that we use but the extraordinary thing is these people were working with these very complex arithmetic data mathematical calculations and they were never translating them into abstract graphic forms like numbers everything was in knots so the total I mean it's incomprehensible to me it's incomprehensible that all of the mathematics was never in the same terms that we might think of like a flash on the screen the reading of a strand of these kipu in chords and you and I would be able to read the numbers but they never read numbers they read knots they read configurations so there was a sensibility there was a mentality here that I think potentially is unexplored in human in the history of psychology how does one conceive of these things of these twists in space these topological bending of chords in space and that is number that's not like number that is number so numbers is extraordinarily important here in that and then that takes us back to the mama because the mama is the one that she's the origin of them yes it is the most beautiful thing what you just said the notion that we're facing a different mind a mind that may take us back to a future possibility now open for example by quantum physics and the way in astrophysics now they're finding a way where the minute the subatomic particle dimension the quanta dimension and the dimension of the cosmos can talk to each other I think we are at the moment in human culture and in the advance of science where a possibility of understanding at least the metaphor involved in the awareness and I would say two separate things to complement what you said one is that here with my partner the poet James O'Hern we're working on a book that is a a book after documenta our experience in documenta and what that takes us is to the origin of knowledge as it may have been in the ancient Americas and in the ancient Mediterranean world and it all has to do with the world that existed before patriarchy when astronomy and numbers were first appeared in relation to female culture so there may be a future history to be written out of this pursuit of finding the origin of numbers the origin of mathematics in astronomy and in relationship to menstruation and rights so even the idea of month that we say the word mens it comes from menses from menstruation the concepts of rhythm and so forth all these concepts come from an ancient understanding of the infinite dimension of space and the infimal dimension of our bodies our blood our fluids and so this integration this sort of dialogue of dimensions is what for me is the quipo and I know that in your work you for example relating back to the history of what was your first encounter with that quipo in a dark room illuminated by winter light coming from the window I thought was so beautiful because you said something so wonderful that really not that you would not like what I say that it makes you that moment you become like a poet quipo you say that you believe that it's for the first time that your entire body is engaged your body, your mind, your spirit all your dimensions are engaged in front of this mysterious object that mesmerizes you and mystifies you and you don't know what the fact is it has this power that you can feel like something happening to you that is of different order and I think that is the direction that we want to imagine that there may be a human future that there may be a different culture ahead of us and not just behind us if I think it would be through pursuing this kind of suggestions that the quipo implies and I think that is what keeps me nothing and that is the reason why I do them colossally why is it? it is a gene observed when I extend these huge strings of wool the people who work with me here from the Brooklyn Museum or any volunteer that happens to be participating either in my performances rights or in the construction of the quipo knows that what happens is that the wool becomes sort of alive in connection with the body and the wool itself has a sort of rhythm and it's sort of grabbing us suddenly the relationship is exchanged and we are dancing with it at each rhythm and so we become so happy in this process for example from the quipo observed at the end of the performance that we had last Sunday here that babies in a little courage, I mean these are babies that are not a year old they were grabbing the wool and sort of holding on to the wool as if the wool was their mama as if the wool was their little pet animal but larger than them you know and what is it there's something in this ancient metaphor created by our four mothers who knows 20,000, 30,000 years ago and the core metaphor is that water and thread and life are one and for example the weavers the shepherd women that are still in their world view in places like Bolivia they say that the unspun wool is cosmic gas that it comes from the cosmic gas where galaxies are born and where water is born and lo and behold now with astrophysics we do know that it's exactly materially true that water originates in that cosmic gas where galaxies are born so what kind of knowledge is at play that can be so precise it's amazing I was just thinking of a way to from what you had been saying earlier to talk just a little bit about Quechua and the astronomy and you went directly to the point that I was that I was thinking about and anticipating the extraordinary I think part of this part of the interest in doing this is to be sure also that we keep a focus on the Incas the Incas are the people who made these things and they made them like to about 500 years ago or so most of us know nothing about the Incas I was educated just a normal school and you almost learned almost nothing about the Incas maybe one learns a little bit about the Aztecs and the Mayas and the Incas but most of us confused them and had no idea really where one and where the other is but I mean it was the Incas this was this ancient civilization that began just about 150 years or so before they were conquered by the Spaniards in 1532 they built an empire they built a world inside one of the most complex environments in the world going from the Pacific Coast on the western coast of South America up over the second highest mountains in the world and the down into the largest rainforest in the world which is the rainforest and they and they did that and one of the challenges they had was with such variability with such ecological environment variability how do you keep track of everything and one of the things that they were very good at was astronomy and they did make very precise observations of celestial phenomena and one of the extraordinary things about their astronomy they're not unique but they're almost unique in this regard is that they have constellations not only like the constellations in the west made up of conceptually linking neighboring stars like the constellations we have but rather they're these very dark clouds that are fixed inside the Milky Way which is their which is the celestial phenomenon of most interest to them the bright stars of the Milky Way but inside that are these very deep dark streaks these are not meteorological clouds they're cosmic clouds they're clouds of cosmic dust that Cecilia was just describing and they say that these are the result of the Milky Way going around the earth going into what is the cosmic sea so this is the traditional understanding going around earth going underground and they are taking up water and then this sort of cosmic moth that lies at the bottom of the cosmos and carrying it up into the sky and that constitutes these dark spots in the Milky Way but they're all animals and those are the prototypes of all the animals so all the animals on the earth are born from their prototype their sort of place of creativity of origin in these dark clouds in the Milky Way and then as Cecilia just said in fact astrophysics tells us now that that's where new galaxies are actually being born inside our galaxy are these inside these clouds of cosmic dust so I'm not claiming the ink is new all that I didn't know was what they knew and they knew the part of it that had to do with the world that they were attempting to produce a reasonable sensible comprehensive understanding of how the world were and that was their explanation for how water got in the sky it went up there with the Milky Way that was also how animals are born is this fertile earth gets up in there and influences the birth and that's peace then I mean that's knowledge that's there integrated with this mathematical knowledge integrated with these sensibilities linked to the Kipu chords that all has the great mass of sort of knowledge and awareness of the world that we will have to be aware of in order to get to the bottom of what they are and that's why I think again Cecilia's work is so extraordinarily not just interesting which it is but important is that it brings the sensibility to issues of what are threads what is wool and what are knots in particular like what kind of thing are they what what if you work with knots your whole life what kind of sensibilities, conceptions get sort of planted in your brain as normal like I just think that there was probably the stimulus of ways of thinking that are probably not reproduced in other cultures primarily because of this intimate contact they had with threads and chords and greetings and knots I think this is absolutely true it is about the Inca's I would say hearing you and two stories came to mind there is a scholar Jorge Flores Ochoa that I'm sure you know him personally and Flores Ochoa went to the etymology the possible etymology of the word Inca and he found it to be traceable to the concept of Inca and Inca means life force so it would be perhaps what you can conclude is that perhaps the Incas call themselves Inca because they were representatives of the life force and think of what a concept that means then I have another anthropologist friend his name is Claudio Mercado and one day Claudio Mercado and Victoria Castro two archaeologists anthropologists from Chile are high in the Andes speaking to some shepherds who of course don't know how to read and write that are very old and who live in the most far away remote places and yet they still have a living memory that doesn't come from books about what the Inca were so somehow in this phrase this conversation with the anthropologist the concept of the Incas come in and the shepherds starts lecturing the anthropologist about what the Incas had achieved a sort of super human kind of energy that was released by being shared collectively and communally by thousands of people so how come that the oral memory didn't die in 500 years of the power unleashed by the Inca universe that's what attracted me to it when I encountered that Inca mommy child I felt that I had been somehow imagination into a form of sensibility and I was lucky enough to be part of a family that was one of the few families I'm sure that had books of European art because the despise of everything pre-colonial indigenous and in particular of the Incas in South America is brutal and continues to be brutal despise despite the effort of institutions like the big museums, the universities, the scholars still children do not learn about these things in school to me it's a cultural crime the colonization of the mind is definitely a cultural crime but that perhaps is one of the things that you know art is like a virus is like an infection and it seems that it's a kind of infection that people are more and more attracted to and I don't know if you have heard of the new discoveries about genetics which is that what affects our genetic makeup is not ascendancy meaning a vertical line but our genetic makeup is also made vertically I thought what a beautiful sorry, horizontally yes so vertical one from ascendancy and horizontally means that someone may pass by and we get that genetic information of course someone passing by may be a virus may be a bacteria in other words I love this idea of getting infection from something happening horizontally that this infection from horizontal ideas and behaviors can really affect the future the future outcome of humanity that decides not forget what we can be well maybe if we take a few minutes and see it there are any questions for anyone? I have a question about Kiku in the sunlight in the window which is when I first heard that I went oh no because sunlight can sometimes degrade materials especially wool so I wanted to ask about that very specifically what is the material and also what are the processes of preservation that are useful not so useful has there been attention to that and this history of exploitation to museums around the world is 500 years history of exporting perfume right well the preservation history is a checkered picture there are some museums that I think do a wonderful job not that I'm one to judge that but it seemed to me to put enormous effort into trying to ensure the preservation of these things that particular instance of letting the light shine in on the Kiku I think that was a fairly brief exposure to the light but you're right in this situation the majority of the Kikus that we have today of which I've inventoryed about 1,045 samples in museums in Europe, North America and South America and something like 90-95% so the vast majority are of cotton a lot of the color some of the color in the cotton Kikus comes from the cotton itself so in Peru in pre-Columbian times they grew cotton in some four or five different colors or shades so some of the color that you've been seeing in the images of the Kikus that have come up is from different naturally colored cotton they also used wool and so but not of course sheep's wool because there were no sheep so this was camel fiber the wool of or the hair of yamas and alpacas that holds dye better than cotton does so most of the highly dyed samples that we have or individual cords in Kikus of which the other majority of the strings are cotton the heavily dyed ones are primarily camel fiber right so we get like natural dyes that are applied to those the great majority of the Kikus were found when we know anything about what their archeological context was were found in graves on the coast of Peru of northern Chile and those coast those coastal strips are the driest desert in the world the north coast of Chile and southern Peru is drier there than the Sahara desert so extremely good conditions for the preservation of textiles so the majority of these were found in graves now that's a problem I'm sure going through your mind why were they burying these records and for the administrative ones it seems that we are told explicitly by a couple of the Spanish chroniclers that they never made just one record or one copy of a record but rather one of our most knowledgeable chroniclers said in every village no matter how small they had at least four Kipu keepers who all kept the same records so we have multiple copies of these things and today we have copies there's some cases where there's a Kipu in Berlin that's an exact copy of a Kipu in Lima or in Santiago there's a Kipu diaspora called the Antiquities Market I'm sorry, the illegal Antiquities Market the Kipu is a hard drive it's a huge database so where's the calculation so the calculation of the numerical values doesn't take place on the Kipus they did the calculations elsewhere and they just recorded the data on the Kipus so they did the recording in a device called a UPANA and UPANA comes from the catcher where UPANA which means to count so UPANA is a counter and these were these devices that were like about a foot or a foot and a half square internally divided into different squares and they would value those in different decimal values units, tins, hundreds, thousands etc. and then move stones or kernels of corn around inside that like something like an advocate so they were doing the calculations there in this device, in this UPANA and then when they had the sum that's what they would record on the Kipus so there's this collective calculation of these experimental things we have this which I can't but here this is the one would expect some evidence to be proportional to the size of the data that's what we're talking about the devices they seem to be sort of permanent from third to third I think that probably the principle this goes on is the principle of you know the the building of the big monuments on the coast of Peru in very early times that those are massive monuments but they were built just one sack of rocks at a time and one adobe brick at a time and so it's with massive manpower over a long period of time and a lot of organization that got those built and with the Kipus there were thousands of them perhaps tens of thousands of them we don't know how many there were originally but many many because all of the records had to be kept you know all of these administrative matters plus all of the stories et cetera and I mean it probably there was no like supercomputer somewhere where they did all that there was just a series of lots of small computations here and there I mean at some point they are synthesizing these data so there are administrative centers and they're taking in like a lot of information and they're synthesizing so you know you might somebody here might give me a record of 10 or something and somebody else 20 or something and somebody else 50 or something and I make a Kipu that's in the hundreds because I'm synthesizing what you've done so but the interesting thing here I'll just say that I'll be quiet is that we have no Kipus that are preserved from what was the capital city of the Inca Empire of Cusco they destroyed them or they burned them or they hid them or they did something but that's where the server bank would have been like the massive like the large Kipus either there was a huge Kipu that they did that they kept all these data on or in fact they had aggregated data and organized it so concisely that you know they narrowed it down to a small set of Kipus we just don't know how they were operating at that level Hi, this is really interesting the Kipu keeping tradition was that handed down generationally the Kipu keeping tradition was handed down generationally like how did people become Kipus well in Inca times there was a school in the capital of the Inca Empire Cusco where they taught as far as we're told by the Spaniards the sons of nobility we aren't told they taught daughters but the Spaniards were always more than happy to disregard what women were doing so they seldom record any information about it what they do say though is that there was this school the children of nobility went to a four year school the first year was for learning language which was the language of administration the second year was learning the institutions in years three and four was for learning the Kipus so those were the people who went out to the centers and there they taught like the local Kipu keepers so there there would be I mean it was both a formal training and then also there would have been an apprentice training probably a father teaching a son so they probably goes down a line so that in a local community there's probably known to be a lineage of people who were the record keepers but much of that sort of local knowledge about this went unrecorded so all we find are just the sort of scattered remnants of an occasional Kipu here and there in these more remote villages I don't know if that answers your question exactly that does but it also makes me think of something else it was generational it was yes or no generation to generation was there like a certain representative that signature of that family that kept it or that's a great question I don't know that yet I mean there are there are times when like sitting working with the Kipu and looking at knots you know hour after hour day after day week after week I sort of think okay I've got this it's like handwriting this is somebody this is different from that other person this is a different kind of knot so these are two different ways of making knots but of course I can't personalize that I don't know who the individual is but there's a point at which one begins to see different handwriting of knotting and organizing the Kipu so that probably is what was passed on like this is the way we in our family