Gary Urton Quotations

We suggest that any khipu moving within the state administrative system bearing an initial arrangement of three figure-eight knots would have been immediately recognizable to Inca administrators as an account pertaining to the palace of Puruchuco.

We think those may be the narrative ones,

We know a great deal of the bureaucracy was occupied in overseeing tribute labor for the state, so I suspect a large percentage of the quipu had to do with labor.

We hypothesize that the arrangement of three figure-eight knots at the start of these khipu represented the place identifier, or toponym, Puruchuco,

The use of conventional signs is my definition of writing, ... information is being passed through three different levels in ways suggestive of a conventional system.

For the first time, really, we can see how information that was of interest to the state was moving up and down in a set of interrelated khipu.