Two pieces of potatoes discovered in a nearly 500-year-old Inca storage chamber in Peru are a rare find: freeze-dried potatoes from before the Spanish invasion, a new study suggests.
These freeze-dried potatoes, known as chunos, were once the backbone of inca empireFood supplies and products are so fragile that they almost never turn up at archaeological sites.
New discovery made on Peru’s dry southern coast is just that second time Researchers report in a new study that chuno has been recovered from the Inca site. This is solid evidence that the empire directed one of its most important food sources from the Andes to the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles away.
Chuno is made by repeatedly exposing potatoes to night frost and daytime sun until almost complete moisture. has evaporatedLeaving a mild, long-lasting vegetable that can be stored for decades. This technology only works at high altitudes where there is regularly severe cold, so chūno had to be produced in the mountains and then transported using it. llama caravans, often hundreds of kilometers, to feed people Living elsewhere in the Empire.
The Incas, he said, used the same drying method to preserve meat, producing a product called “charqui.” – Source of the English word “jerky”, study principal investigator lidio valdezan assistant professor in the department of anthropology and archeology at the University of Calgary told Live Science in an email.
In a new study published on May 1 Field Archeology JournalValdez and study co-authors Katrina BettcherAn independent archaeologist reported that Chuno was found with fragments of Inca pottery and a broken shard spindle whorlA device used to spin fibers such as raw wool into yarn or thread.
The discovery was made during the 2024 field season at Tambo Viejo, an Inca provincial center in the Acari Valley, where an archaeological team had worked for several years. Inside a small storage room, the team found a clay vessel sunk into the earthen floor, with the top half missing. As soon as the researchers took out soil from the broken vessel, they reached its bottom.
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“Almost at the bottom of the ship, two samples of freeze-dried potatoes were found,” Valdez said. “They showed me without knowing what they were, and immediately I said: Choose!”
Llamas were used to transport food and other goods in the Inca Empire.
(Image credit: Photo by LM Valdez)
Potato About 80% is water, and they typically rot within a week at lower, warmer elevations – making them a poor food choice for long-distance storage. Valdez said freeze-drying was probably invented in the 15th century, long before the Incas came to power, perhaps when potatoes that were accidentally exposed to frost at high altitude were dried and people realized the result was still edible.
Valdez said that, because Chuno can only be found above about 11,800 feet (3,600 m), the samples from Tambo Viejo must have come down from the highlands, possibly via a llama caravan along the Inca road network.
“Chunno being a lightweight product, it probably becomes easier to transport,” he said.
The two freeze-dried potatoes survived due to the extremely dry conditions of the Akari Valley, which helped preserve organic remains that would otherwise rot – the same conditions that created the first naturally mummified guinea pigs (cavia porcellus) in Valdez’s previous work at the site.
Beyond its archaeological importance, the ancient conservation method has lessons for today. “We still have a lot to learn from the people of the past,” Valdez said. “Food security is a major concern even in our time; yet we waste food, perhaps more than at any time in human history.”
Comparatively few Inca sites on the Peruvian coast have been systematically excavated, and Valdez hopes that more evidence of the chuño – and the long supply lines that carried it – will surface as archaeologists continue to excavate.
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