A knotty problem. An illustration and an excellent discussion are to
be found in "Ancient Man: A Handbook of Puzzling Artifacts," William
R. Corliss, "The SourceBook Project" 1978. That's a great tome to
have around when people bring up half-remembered news items about
unusual conclusions drawn from archeology. I should ping them and
see if there's an update.
These links agree with the state of knowlege in the Corliss book,
above.
The discussion of color in this first link is interesting:
http://www.spanish.sbc.edu/MMLatAm/Quipus.html
http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~lipi/quipu/quipu.html
Eirikur
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