Khipu redundancy

Claim (verbatim)

Khipu redundancy. Spanish chroniclers report that Inca accounting was run by paired officials who kept independent records of the same stocks so that each could check the other — and the surviving corpus does contain matching khipus, cord records whose numerical content substantially overlaps. The information-theoretic question is what kind of copies they are. Mechanical duplication — one khipu transcribed from another — propagates errors identically and shares every idiosyncrasy of layout; independent encoding by two accountants, later reconciled, instead produces records that agree on the audited totals while differing in construction details, groupings and residual discrepancies. The conjecture is that paired accounting khipus from checker-pairs of officials show exactly the second pattern: differences consistent with independent encoding plus reconciliation, not duplication. Khipu redundancy would then be an error-correction scheme — dual-entry auditing in knotted cord — testable on the matching pairs in the Khipu Database.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For matching khipu pairs in the Khipu Database, compare agreement on aggregate numerical values against concordance on construction variables (cord grouping, knot placement, colour patterning). Primary clause: in at least two-thirds of matching pairs, the recorded totals agree while at least one construction dimension diverges substantially beyond what direct transcription would produce — the signature of independent encoding reconciled on the numbers. The verdict follows the primary clause.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Khipu Database pair analysis.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The core join is published: the 'Khipu Archives' study examines duplicate/matched khipu sets in the Harvard database against chronicle accounts of multiple parallel khipu-keepers as a checks-and-balances system, distinguishing 'linked' (near-identical) from 'matched' (double-entry-like) pairs — substantially the conjecture's paired-accounting-with-reconciliation claim. Access caveat: full text 403-blocked in the dossier session, so whether its statistical characterization matches the independent-encoding-plus-reconciliation signature specifically is unconfirmed; the join itself is established per the paper's own description.

• 'Khipu Archives: Duplicate Accounts and Identity Labels in the Inka Knotted String Records' (Harvard DASH) — Matched/linked khipu pairs + checks-and-balances framing (snippet-cited; 403)

Predictions

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