Writing in general began as accounting practices. Put your grain in the common granary, get some token (pebbles) for each measure you put in. Redeem them later. Then they started keeping the tokens in a box. Then they wrapped the tokens in clay envelopes marked with your family symbol. But they had to keep breaking them open to count them, then re-wrapping them, so they started putting hash marks on the outside of the envelope. Then they finally realized they didn't need to put anything in the clay, just the hash marks. Voila, writing!
None so fast. It allows us to corroborate the Spanish records with the actual records kept by the natives. That’s a pretty big deal in terms of finding out what parts of the conquest were fact what were fiction.
If they find older records, it would also corroborate the claims that more Incas died from the diseases bought from the Spaniards, than by violence during the invasion.
> Urton says he and other researchers in the field have always had a general sense of what the khipus represented. Many, they could tell, had to do with census data. Others appeared to be registers of goods or calendar systems.
They've known for a while that many kinds of data were recorded with khipus, but (it sounds like) they couldn't read anything but the raw numbers, which were meaningless without context. Medrano has basically discovered a Rosetta Stone, the same data in both a known and unknown language, and it could very well lead to cracking the full language of the khipus.
And don't underestimate census records alone. There's a lot of tremendously valuable information to researchers there.
To me, it looks like a data structure. It would be really cool to find evidence of them using it to calculate taxes or maybe social status, level of political influence, property rights, etc.
...or to figure out whether or knot the interpreter would halt ;)