The capital keeps no cords

Claim (verbatim)

The khipu corpus we hold is not the corpus that existed; it is the corpus that deserts preserve. The chroniclers put the great cord archives at the center — Cieza de Leon interviewed Cuzco's quipucamayocs about the histories and censuses in their keeping — and the Third Council of Lima (1583) ordered khipus destroyed as instruments of superstition. What survives instead comes from coastal graves and huacas: Pachacamac, the Chancay and Ica valleys, Ancon, the Incahuasi caches, with the cloud-forest mausoleums of Laguna de los Condores the great inland exception. Extirpation plus highland climate deleted the imperial archive while sparing provincial grave goods, so every decipherment effort runs on systematically peripheral material — local accounting rather than the canon Cuzco kept — and the inversion should be legible in a single metadata field. Prediction: among khipus with recorded provenience in the Open Khipu Repository, specimens from the Cuzco region will be under 2% while coastal-valley proveniences exceed 80%, leaving the administrative center of the empire essentially unrepresented in the corpus on which decipherment runs (primary clause: the under-2% Cuzco share; the verdict follows it). Kill: the provenance fields of the Open Khipu Repository (the open-data successor of the Harvard Khipu Database Project, on GitHub), tallied by region, with the Laguna de los Condores and Incahuasi excavation publications as cache-level controls.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: among khipus with recorded provenience in the Open Khipu Repository, specimens from the Cuzco region will be under 2% while coastal-valley proveniences exceed 80%, leaving the administrative center of the empire essentially unrepresented in the corpus on which decipherment runs (primary clause: the under-2% Cuzco share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the provenance fields of the Open Khipu Repository (the open-data successor of the Harvard Khipu Database Project, on GitHub), tallied by region, with the Laguna de los Condores and Incahuasi excavation publications as cache-level controls.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Khipu specialists have already published the provenance skew: surviving khipus come from coastal desert contexts (with the Chachapoyas cloud-forest mausoleums the great inland exception) — the corpus literature states that every khipu recovered to date comes from a cotton-producing region — and the Inka heartland around Cuzco is essentially unrepresented archaeologically. Tallying the OKR provenance field re-derives a published fact of the field.

• G. Urton, Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources (University of Texas Press, 2017)
• Khipu Field Guide (khipufieldguide.com), corpus and provenance introduction to the Open Khipu Repository data

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.