as determined by Harvard’s Quipu Database Project, is 60, while the median
number is 27. On about a third of the quipus, pendant cords have second-order
cords attached to them, called subsidiary cords. Subsidiary cords may have
third-order cords attached, and so on down to several levels of subsidiaries. The
deepest level of subsidiary attachments recorded to date is on a sample from
Arica, Chile, which has pendant cords with six levels of subsidiaries.
A quipu, or knotted-string accounting device, found at Laguna de los Cóndores in
the cloud forest of Chachapoyas, northern Peru. Gary Urton, courtesy Museo
Leymebamba, Leymebamba, Amazonas, Peru.Quipus are made of either cotton fibers or camelid hair, although the vast
majority— some 85 percent —are of cotton. They are generally quite colorful, as
a result of the use of differently colored camelid fibers (these vary in hues of
white, beige, brown, black) or cotton fibers. (Ancient Andean domesticated
cotton varies greatly in color: white, and various hues of brown from light brown
to chocolate.) In addition to these material-based sources of color differences,
camelid threads were often dyed with vegetal dyes. It is thought that differences
in cord color were one of the principal ways of signifying the identities of
objects recorded in the quipus.