Two lumps of potato discovered in a roughly 500-year-old Inca storage room in Peru are a rare find: freeze-dried potatoes predating the Spanish invasion, a new study finds.
These freeze-dried potatoes, known as chuño, were once a backbone of the Inca Empire's food supply and a product so fragile that they almost never turn up at archaeological sites.
The new discovery, made along Peru's arid south coast, is only the second time chuño has been recovered from an Inca site, researchers reported in the new study. It is concrete evidence that the empire directed one of its most important food sources hundreds of miles from the Andes, down to the Pacific Ocean.
Chuño is made by repeatedly exposing potatoes to nighttime frost and daytime sun until nearly all their moisture
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