A New Naming Convention for Andean Khipus

Abstract

Since the 1970s, hundreds of khipus—Andean knotted-string recording devices—have been named after academic researchers. This practice disassociates individual khipus from their places of origin and reifies scientific inequity. Here, a new convention of the form KH#### (e.g., KH0125) is proposed, which we believe represents a more neutral, direct, and accurate nomenclature. The change is implemented in the Open Khipu Repository (OKR), the largest khipu database.