Archaeologists may be closer than ever to deciphering the mystery of ancient Inca "khipus," or knotted string records, after they discovered several of the records at the the place where they were originally used.

The find, which occurred at a site called Incahuasi, about 100 miles south of the Peruvian capital of Lima, gives researchers hope that they may soon gain an understanding of non-numerical signifiers in the khipus -- something that has eluded experts for a long time, the New York Times reported.

Archaeologists already know the string records incorporate a mathematical system in which knots represent numbers and the relation between knots and strings can represent operations, such as addition and subtraction. But they might now discover that the khipus at a storage house might point to a certain agricultural products to single out, for example, a color, knot or other signifier for "peanut," the newspaper explained.

Gary Urton, a leading expert on the devices who is studying the discovery, said experts were more hopeful than ever take make more sense of the ancient record-keeping technology.

"We can look at how the chili pepper khipu differs from the peanut khipu and from the corn khipu in terms of their color and other characteristics and we can build up a kind of sign vocabulary of how they were signifying this or that thing in their world," he explained. "It's not the great Rosetta Stone but it's quite an important new body of data to work with. It's tremendously exciting," Urton added.

The Incahuasi archaeological complex contains more than 20 khipus, all of which are in a good state of conversation, the Peruvian news agency Andina reported. Researcher Alejandro Chu, who along with Urton leads the excavations at the storage house site, told the newswire their discovery marked the first time string records had been found outside a grave site.

It is believed that Inca scribes were often buried with the devices they had created, and the conditions of such grave sites were ideal for the khipus' survival. But the fact that the records had been removed from their original context limited experts' ability to understand their full meaning.