A Single Lock of Hair Could Rewrite What We Know About Inca Record-Keeping
23rd May 2026
More than 500 years ago in what is now Peru, the Inca Empire relied on one of the world’s most distinctive, and poorly understood, systems for recording information: sets of intricately knotted cords known as khipus. For centuries, archaeologists and historians believed making and reading these cords was a job for the elite, reserved only for men who were literate bureaucrats. Yet a single lock of hair is challenging that picture.
After analyzing a 500-year-old khipu made of human hair, a team of anthropologists found that its creator’s diet did not include foods associated with the Inca upper classes such as maize and meat. The results, published today in Science Advances, suggest the khipu wasn’t made by an imperial bureaucrat, but rather by someone of much lower status, like a commoner.
The finding suggests “that numeracy was much more widespread in the population … [and] probably not just in the hands of men,” says Karenleigh Overmann, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs who was not involved in the study. “Anybody can tie knots and strings.”