The cords testify in translation

Claim (verbatim)

The administrative khipu genres that physical survival lost — the storehouse, census, and delivery cords of the working state, as against the funerary finds that fill collections — survive as content, in Spanish, inside colonial litigation. In 1561 the kurakas of Hatun Xauxa pressed claims with khipu readings itemizing what the Huancas had delivered to the Spaniards since Cajamarca, entered line by line into the record and published four centuries later by Waldemar Espinoza Soriano; in 1562 the visita of Íñigo Ortiz de Zúñiga at Huánuco had Chupachu khipu accounts read into the inspection protocols, edited by John Murra; in the 1570s a tribute-restitution suit from Sacaca in Charcas preserved khipu-based accountings that Tristan Platt has analyzed. These transcripts are a paper shadow-archive of the destroyed cord archive, and they carry a testable signature of the lost genre's standardization: Murra, reading the Xauxa lists, argued that the items march in a fixed canonical order — an imperial recitation template, not an ad hoc inventory. If the template was imperial, independent transcriptions a thousand kilometers apart must share it; if each reading was local improvisation, they will not. The physical counterpart of this genre is nearly gone — Medrano and Urton's match of a small Santa Valley khipu group to a 1670 revisita is the rare surviving pairing of cord and paper — which makes the transcripts the primary archive of Inka accounting, recoverable only through the courts that transcribed it. Prediction: aligning the itemized khipu transcriptions of at least three independent proceedings (Xauxa 1561, Huánuco 1562, Sacaca 1570s), the category orderings will agree far beyond chance — pairwise rank correlation of at least 0.6, or identical leading-category blocks, across all pairs — elevating Murra's single-case observation to a corpus regularity (primary clause: the cross-region ordering agreement at rho of at least 0.6; the verdict follows it). Kill: Espinoza Soriano's edition of the Huanca probanzas (1971-72), Murra's edition of the Visita de la provincia de León de Huánuco (1967-72), and Platt's Sacaca study in Quilter and Urton, eds., Narrative Threads (Texas, 2002), with Murra's essay on the ethnocategories of a state khipu as control; the aligned cross-case dataset is not yet built.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: aligning the itemized khipu transcriptions of at least three independent proceedings (Xauxa 1561, Huánuco 1562, Sacaca 1570s), the category orderings will agree far beyond chance — pairwise rank correlation of at least 0.6, or identical leading-category blocks, across all pairs — elevating Murra's single-case observation to a corpus regularity (primary clause: the cross-region ordering agreement at rho of at least 0.6; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Espinoza Soriano's edition of the Huanca probanzas (1971-72), Murra's edition of the Visita de la provincia de León de Huánuco (1967-72), and Platt's Sacaca study in Quilter and Urton, eds., Narrative Threads (Texas, 2002), with Murra's essay on the ethnocategories of a state khipu as control; the aligned cross-case dataset is not yet built.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The three transcribed proceedings are published — Espinoza Soriano's Huanca probanzas, Murra's edition of the Huanuco visita, Platt's Sacaca study in Narrative Threads — and Murra's single-case observation that the Xauxa list follows a fixed canonical order is in print, as the conjecture states. But the primary clause is a cross-region statistical test that Murra never ran: aligning the itemized category orderings of at least three independent readings and showing pairwise rank agreement at rho of at least 0.6. The conjecture is explicit that 'the aligned cross-case dataset is not yet built,' and elevating one case to a corpus regularity is precisely the un-run study; the sources sit ready in the immediate neighborhood.

• John V. Murra (ed.), Inigo Ortiz de Zuniga, Visita de la Provincia de Leon de Huanuco en 1562, 2 vols. (Huanuco: Universidad Nacional Hermilio Valdizan, 1967-1972)
• Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton (eds.), Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), incl. Tristan Platt's Sacaca study

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.