original_query: What is the purpose of quipus?
query: What is the purpose of quipus?
answer: Quipus were used by the Inca people for collecting data and keeping records, including monitoring tax obligations, census records, calendrical information, and military organization.  They stored numeric and other values encoded as knots, often in a base-ten positional system. Some scholars believe they also contained non-numeric information, potentially even representing a writing system.