Quinoa, potatoes, and llamas fueled emergent social complexity in the Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes

Miller, Morton W.; Kendall, Iain; Capriles, José M.; Bruno, Maria C.; Evershed, Richard P.; Hastorf, Christine A.

doi:10.1073/pnas.2113395118

Cited by 22 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…Independently from Mexico, Amaranth was domesticated in Peru. However, here, Amaranth was mainly used for subsistence mountain agriculture and ritual purposes, and never acquired the same importance as its relative Quinoa, which, along with potato, became the staple food of the Andean cultures [7]. Only in the 1960ies, Peruvian Amaranth, known under the qichwa name kiwicha, had been re-discovered, re-installed, and popularised by the intense efforts of Luis Sumar Kalinowski (1993).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A rapid, simple, and reliable assay to authenticate Peruvian kiwicha (A. caudatus) for food applications

Kanbar

Beisel

Wetters

et al. 2022

Eur Food Res Technol

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Amaranth has acquired great economic impact as functional food, with species originating from Mexico dominating global trade. In contrast, the Peruvian A. caudatus (kiwicha) has been vastly neglected, although it is endowed with very promising nutritive traits. Morphological plasticity and taxonomic ambiguities render authentication of Amaranth difficult, such that the identity of commercial samples is often unclear. To safeguard the authenticity of kiwicha and, thus, consumer safety, we characterised a germplasm collection of 84 Amaranth accessions on both, the morphological and the genetic level. We show that kiwicha can be delineated phenotypically from other species by its late flowering, taller posture, and lower grain yields. Instead, flower and seed color, often used as proxy for identity, do not qualify as taxonomic markers. Using the plastidic barcoding marker psbA-trnH igs we were able to identify a specific Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) that separated kiwicha from all other species of Amaranth. This allowed us to develop a sequencing-free authentication assay using an Amplified Refractory Mutation System (ARMS) strategy. As a result kiwicha in commercial samples can be authenticated by a single duplex-PCR yielding a diagnostic side band reporting A. caudatus against all other species of Amaranthus. This fingerprinting assay will help to develop the nutritive potential of kiwicha and to safeguard seed material for A. caudatus against adulteration by the far more prevalent species from Mexico.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A rapid, simple, and reliable assay to authenticate Peruvian kiwicha (A. caudatus) for food applications

Kanbar

Beisel

Wetters

et al. 2022

Eur Food Res Technol

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“…These results conform to a growing dataset from different parts of the Central Andes that indicates that prior to c. 700 BC maize was not a dietary staple. Though maize is present in the Peruvian highlands by 4000-3600 BP (Perry et al 2006) and on the coast by c. 6700-6500 BP (Grobman et al 2012), isotopic studies from Andean highland and coastal sites dating between the third and early first millennia BC indicate that human populations relied primarily on C 3 plants, rather than maize (Burger 2012; Burger and Van der Merwe 1990; Miller et al 2021; Pezo-Lanfranco et al 2022; Seki and Yoneda 2005; Turner et al 2018; Tykot et al 2006; Washburn et al 2020; c.f., Finucane 2009; Tung et al 2020). Mean δ 13 C values from Canchas Uckro (−18.9‰) are virtually identical to those from a sample of burials from the Urabarriu (n = 4) and Janabarriu Phases (n = 1) at Chavín de Huántar, as well as Huaricoto (−18.5‰) (Burger and van der Merwe 1990).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diet During the Late Initial Period (1100–800 BC) in the Chavín Heartland: New Data from Canchas Uckro (North-Central Peru)

Nesbitt

Weber

Washburn

et al. 2023

Journal of Ethnobiology

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During the late Initial Period (c. 1100-800 BC), the Conchucos region of highland Peru witnessed the formation of the ceremonial and “proto-urban” center of Chavín de Huántar (c. 1000-500/400 BC). An important question regarding Chavín de Huántar centers on the nature of its subsistence economy during the time when it was first founded. In this paper, we present new results from zooarchaeological, starch granule, and stable isotope (δ13C and δ15N) analyses to reconstruct diet from Canchas Uckro, a settlement located in Chavín de Huántar's heartland region. Founded c. 1100 BC and abandoned just after 800 BC, Canchas Uckro provides insight into socioeconomic processes during the early phases of Chavín de Huántar. Extant faunal remains suggest deer comprised an important component of the diet, while camelids constitute a minor proportion of the assemblage. Starch granules recovered from the pottery indicate that domesticated cultigens (maize, potato, and manioc) were obtained from different highland production zones. δ13C and δ15N analysis of a sample of human skeletal remains, coupled with Stable Isotope Analysis in R (SIAR) mixing models, demonstrate that C3 plants constitute most of the diet, while maize was not intensively consumed. δ13C and δ15N further indicate that deer made up 25-50% of the diet. The results of this study add to a gro wing corpus of data on subsistence practices in the north-central and northern highlands of Peru prior to the widespread adoption of domesticated camelids.

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“…In the following millennia and likely driven by mobile and interconnected foraging and horticultural groups, plants such as cassava, cucurbits, maize and even cacao, progressively became disseminated throughout the Neotropics (Kistler et al, 2018;Watling et al, 2018;Zarrillo et al, 2018). While we still do not know very much about domestication processes in much of the Andean highlands, during the Middle Holocene (8,200 cal BP), increased socioeconomic engagement with camelids, wild tubers, and chenopods triggered the emergence of agropastoral communities in the central and south-central Andes (Pearsall, 1989;Lane, 2006;Bruno and Hastorf, 2016;Langlie, 2021;Miller et al, 2021). The adoption of agriculture in the Pacific coast seems to have occurred by the end of Middle Holocene and the beginning of the Late Holocene (4,200-0 cal BP), driven by semi-sedentary maritime societies, which benefited from planting cotton used for making fishing nets as well as a range of comestible cultigens (Hastorf, 1999;Dillehay, 2014;Beresford-Jones et al, 2018).…”

Section: Early Food Production East and West Of The Andesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pre-Columbian cultivation of vegetatively propagated and fruit tree tropical crops in the Atacama Desert

Capriles

García²,

Valenzuela³

et al. 2022

Front. Ecol. Evol.

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South America is a megadiverse continent that witnessed the domestication, translocation and cultivation of various plant species from seemingly contrasting ecosystems. It was the recipient and supplier of crops brought to and from Mesoamerica (such as maize and cacao, respectively), and Polynesia to where the key staple crop sweet potato was exported. Not every instance of the trans-ecological expansion of cultivated plants (both domesticated and wild), however, resulted in successful farming. Here, we review the transregional circulation and introduction of five food tropical crops originated in the tropical and humid valleys of the eastern Andes—achira, cassava, ahipa, sweet potato, and pacay—to the hyper-arid coastal valleys of the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, where they have been found in early archeological sites. By means of an evaluation of the contexts of their deposition and supported by direct radiocarbon dating, stable isotopes analyses, and starch grain analysis, we evaluate different hypotheses for explaining their introduction and adaptation to the hyper-arid soils of northern Chile, by societal groups that after the introduction of cultigens still retained a strong dependence on marine hunting, gathering and fishing ways of life based on wide variety of marine coast resources. Many of the studied plants were part of a broader package of introduced goods and technological devices and procedures, linked to food, therapeutic medicine, social and ritual purposes that transformed previous hunter-gatherer social, economic, and ideological institutions. Based on archeological data, we discuss some of the possible socio-ecological processes involved in the development of agricultural landscapes including the adoption of tropical crops originated several hundred kilometers away from the Atacama Desert during the Late Holocene.

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Quinoa, potatoes, and llamas fueled emergent social complexity in the Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes

Cited by 22 publications

References 76 publications

A rapid, simple, and reliable assay to authenticate Peruvian kiwicha (A. caudatus) for food applications

A rapid, simple, and reliable assay to authenticate Peruvian kiwicha (A. caudatus) for food applications

Diet During the Late Initial Period (1100–800 BC) in the Chavín Heartland: New Data from Canchas Uckro (North-Central Peru)

Pre-Columbian cultivation of vegetatively propagated and fruit tree tropical crops in the Atacama Desert

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