Santa Valley Quipus
The Santa Valley Quipus are a group of six ancient knotted-cord records from Peru’s Santa River Valley. Made of cotton, they measure about 106 cm by 65 cm. They date to the Colonial Period and were found together in the Santa Valley, though their exact origin is unknown. Today they are kept at the Biblioteca Museo Temple Radicati in Lima and were studied by Carlos Radicati di Primeglio in the mid-20th century.
Each quipu shows a color-banded pattern of cords. A single color band has six pendant cords, giving a total of 804 cords arranged into 133 six-cord groups. The six quipūs likely form one archival set.
Scholars have linked the quipus to a 1670 Spanish colonial census, known as a revisita, from San Pedro de Corongo. The census lists 132 tributaries within six lineage groups (pachacas), which roughly matches the 133 six-cord groups in the quipus. The total tribute described in the census also seems to align with the knot values of the first cords in each six-cord group.
Recent work has explored how the quipus encode social information. A 2018 study suggested that the front (recto) and back (verso) attachments may indicate each tributary’s moiety, or social half. A 2024 study strengthened this idea, proposing that verso attachments represent the upper hanan moiety and recto attachments the lower hurin moiety. The order of the six lineage groups in the census also appears to reflect a two-part (bipartite) and three-part (tripartite) social structure common in Andean societies.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 21:00 (CET).