Last week in social studies we studied ancient civilizations located in Middle and South America. One of the civilizations we studied was the Incan Empire. The Incas were a group of people who established a great civilization high in the Andes Mountains on the west coast of South America in the 1400s and 1500s. The Incas were known for their unique farming technique of terrace building. The Incan road system ran for nearly 2,500 miles from Ecuador down to Argentina. The Inca had a system for getting messages spread all over their vast empire. They used relay runners that would carry necklace like objects known as quipus. Quipus are a group of knotted strings that the Incas used to keep track of information in the empire. Each quipu had a main chord with several colored strings attached. The colors represented different items, and each had knots of varying sizes that stood for numbers. The Inca kept track of things such as births, deaths, and harvests.
Each of my students last week used yarn, and their imagination to create their own personal quipus. They thought of numbers that were important to them in their lives, and tied knots of varying positions on the colored chords to represent those numbers. Check out our quipus in the photo below.
This is an actual Incan quipu.
