Subjects covered in this paper include the building construction and architecture of the Incas, their agricultural technologies, ceramics and clay products, metallurgy, textiles, roads and communications.
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This is an excerpt from the paper entitled "Technologies of the Incas and their Origins" by A P Fletcher, published in the Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 1999 Vol 71, No 1.
Subjects covered in this paper include the building construction and architecture of the Incas, their agricultural technologies, ceramics and clay products, metallurgy, textiles, roads and communications.
We provide here some short extracts, describing just some of the metallurgical processes of the Incas and their use of the 'quipu' as a method of recording, storing and disseminating information.
On metallurgy:
"One very remarkable form of casting was the ‘lost wax’ method. For this the object required was formed in beeswax and this was covered in fine clay to produce a mould. The clay was next allowed to harden and then heated and the beeswax drained off. Molten metal was now poured into the reheated mould in which holes had been left to prevent airlocks. Then after cooling the mould was broken and the casting trimmed of vent metal and polished. The skill of the craftsmen who did this work was quite exceptional as the illustration of the fine wire filigree gold earpiece shows.
Another interesting technique practised first in Ecuador was the making of small ornaments from platinum. For two hundred years the Europeans who studied these could not understand how the melting temperature of 1770 degrees centigrade could have been achieved. Analysis since has shown that the metal was formed by mixing four volumes of platinum grains with one of gold dust and heating these to the melting point of gold. On cooling, the product had the appearance of platinum and could be hammered and worked like the pure metal; in fact a sintering process had been used, the gold acting as a solder..."
On the quipu:
"There was also one application of cords that was unique to the Incas; this was a data storage device called the quipu which was an essential component in the Inca system of government in which everyone was officially a member of a clearly defined community where eighty-five per cent lived and farmed, paying tax in produce. They also helped maintain the local road, irrigation and storage systems. The other fifteen per cent worked full time for the state away from home in the civil service or as soldiers.
As in wartime Britain, labour was directed and to control this, a data storage system was necessary and the quipu, a system of knots in readily available textile threads, was used to record the quantities and location of the empire’s manpower and its matériel resources.
The illustration (on the right) shows how this worked. There is a main horizontal cord with thinner cords attached. The knots in those going downwards show 347 living in a community, of whom 47 are widows, and the rising thin cord indicates men away on army service.
The next illustration (see below) is typical of quipus recovered from grave-goods that have never been decoded, but by using a range of different types of knots and colours and by having carefully selected and highly-trained operators in every community, a system had been developed that enabled the latter not only to use the same accounting methods, but to recall the same laws, penalties, songs, legends and historical events..."
The Author concludes:
"From 8000BC there had been a steady development of a range of technologies that led to the building of the Inca empire and the view of most Peruvianists, although not all, is that the basic discoveries and inventions were made in South America and owed nothing to contact from across the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans. It would also seem that all pre-colonialist artefacts found to date had their origins in South America and that before the Spanish invasion there was no cart-wheel, potters wheel, bellows or iron, saw or wooden plank, arch or cement, paper or writing. It would also seem that of all the technologies used by the Incas and described in this paper, only the long suspension bridge and the quipu might have been invented by them.
The Incas did not have superior technologies of those of the powerful states they conquered, but their use of those was more farseeing. They had better roads, better intelligence with their data storage and communications networks, and the widespread state food deposits not only helped local people when natural disasters struck but were used by the army when on the march so that the people’s own stocks were not inevitably raided. These advantages stemmed from a policy of sending technical experts to each new territory to instruct its population on what to grow and where, how to build terraces and irrigation canals, how to store food and how to maintain their sector of the national communication system. The strategy of spreading the use of key technologies on a wide scale not only helped with their military campaigns but was instrumental in creating a form of government that was perhaps 'the most autocratic, bureaucratic, and socialistic that there has ever been anywhere at any time'."
The complete text of this paper (18 pages) can be purchased on line from our archive.
See also The Megalithic Ruins at Cuzco, Peru, by C O Becker, Volume 21, 1940-41.
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