What they actually found out:
“Manny has proven that the way in which pendant cords are tied to the top cord indicates which social group an individual belonged to. This is the first time anyone has shown that and it's a big deal,”
“Manny has proven that the way in which pendant cords are tied to the top cord indicates which social group an individual belonged to. This is the first time anyone has shown that and it's a big deal,”
I read that to mean there's more, but it'll be published in Ethnohistory.
The Inca had no money: http://www.discover-peru.org/inca-economy-society/ but they had to distribute goods for all the members of society. The knots were probably central to their organization.
If they find older records, it would also corroborate the claims that more Incas died from the diseases bought from the Spaniards, than by violence during the invasion.
To me, it looks like a data structure. It would be really cool to find evidence of them using it to calculate taxes or maybe social status, level of political influence, property rights, etc.
...or to figure out whether or knot the interpreter would halt ;)
> Urton says he and other researchers in the field have always had a general sense of what the khipus represented. Many, they could tell, had to do with census data. Others appeared to be registers of goods or calendar systems.
They've known for a while that many kinds of data were recorded with khipus, but (it sounds like) they couldn't read anything but the raw numbers, which were meaningless without context. Medrano has basically discovered a Rosetta Stone, the same data in both a known and unknown language, and it could very well lead to cracking the full language of the khipus.
And don't underestimate census records alone. There's a lot of tremendously valuable information to researchers there.