Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer
Harvard student Manny Medrano displays a model of khipu knots, an information system that the Inca used to tally and record data. He decoded the meaning when he was 19.

This is a period in history when our hopes have been raised that young people will solve some of our knottiest problems. How can they do that? Because they have a fresh perspective, I think, and like the “whiz kids” in the Tracy Kidder book Soul of a New Machine, they don’t know what’s impossible.

At the Boston Globe, Cristela Guerra writes of a problem solved by a teenager — a literally knotty one. She calls it “a mystery that has left many scholars flummoxed.

“For all the achievements of the Inca Empire, including a massive roadway system, sophisticated farming methods, and jaw-dropping architecture, it was the only pre-Columbian state that did not invent a system of writing.

“Instead, the Inca, whose civilization originated in Peru and grew to include peoples and cultures all along the west coast of South America from 1400 to 1532, relied on knotted strings to encode information, a system so complex that scholars still struggle to make sense of it.

“Which is what makes the work of Harvard student Manny Medrano all the more remarkable. The young student provided new insight into how the Inca recorded information by analyzing the colors and the direction of the knots placed on the strings known as khipus. …

“Three years ago, freshman Medrano was working as a research assistant for Gary Urton, the Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian Studies and chair in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. Medrano, then just 19, decided to spend his spring break analyzing the data from six khipus that were found in the collection of an old Italian count who’d lived in Peru. …

” ‘The only history we have of the Inca Empire are ones that were written by Spaniards after they conquered the Incas,’ said Urton. …

“There is no Rosetta Stone for khipus, no translation for what the patterns of knots represent, and no match between the Spanish documents and the khipus themselves. …

“Medrano set to work. Though he was most interested in studying mathematics and economics, he also had a strong interest in archeology. … He made graphs and compared the knots on the khipu to an old Spanish census document from the region when something clicked.

” ‘Something looked out of the ordinary in that moment,’ Medrano said. ‘It seemed there was a coincidence that was too strong to be random.’

“He realized that, like a kind of textile abacus, the number of unique colors on the strings nearly matched with the number of first names on the Spanish census.

“For example, if there were eight ‘Felipes,’ all were indicated by one color, while ‘Joses”’ were indicated by another color. …

“As a result of Medrano’s discoveries, Urton and Medrano produced a paper, [published] in the academic journal Ethnohistory in January. Medrano, now a junior, is the lead author of the article, ‘Toward the Decipherment of a Set of Mid-Colonial Khipus from the Santa Valley, Coastal Peru.’ …

“Medrano plans to continue his research. He has decided to major in applied mathematics and minor in archeology.”

More at the Globe, here.