520 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1925 



Among the plant products and representations of fruits and vege- 

 tables dug uj) by the author in Peru, the most common were maize 

 and maize gods, beans {Phaseolus vulgaris) both round and kidney- 

 shaped, lima beans {Phaseolus lunatus) shaped somewhat like the 

 Old World broad bean or faba, peanuts {Amchis hypogcBa)^ several 

 varieties of squashes {Cucurhita pepo)^ round and crook-necked, 

 smooth and warty, hard-shelled gourds {Cucui-hita lagenaria) used 

 as containers, and — most interesting of all — So/an u?/i fuherosiwi, the 

 papas of the Quichuas, either dried or represented in terra cotta, 

 sometimes as facsimiles of the original tubers, but more often conven- 

 tionalized in black or red pottery.-*' Dried potatoes were found by 

 the author in graves at Arica on the coast of northern Chile in 1887, 

 together with arrow points and llama-drivers' slings from the elevated 

 plateau about Lake Titicaca. Terra cotta huacas, or funeral vases, 

 representing potatoes were most abundant in graves near Chimbote 

 and Chepen, northern Peru. In the accompanying illustrations, Plate 

 G, Figure 2 shows a collection of food products from pre-Columbian 

 graves in the New York Museum of Natural History ; Plate 7, Fig- 

 ure 1 is a funeral vase from Chimbote representing two potatoes 

 in natural colors; and Plate 7, Figures 2 and 3, show vases of 

 black ware from the same locality in the form of conventionalized 

 potatoes. Solanum tuberosum can not be cultivated successfully 

 at low elevations in the tropics, so that the potatoes, which were 

 evidently an important food staple of the early inhabitants of the 

 Chimbote region, must have been brought down from the nearby 

 mountains. These dried potatoes and representations of potatoes 

 were certainly interred with the dead in pre-Columbian times. 

 They are the most ancient illustrations of potato culture in exist- 

 ence. 



TRUE HISTORY OF THE POTATO . 



The first published account of Solanurn tuherosmn is that of 

 Pedro de Cieza de Leon, who, in 1538, encountered it in the upper 

 Cauca valley between Popayan and Pasto, in what is now Colombia, 

 and afterward at Quito, now the capital city of Ecuador. At that 

 time he passed through villages so high above sea level that maize 

 would not grow in their vicinity, where the principal food crops 

 mentioned by him were papas and quinoa (the minute seeds of 

 C heno,podiuni quinoa)^ both of which are still the most important 

 foods of the mountains and elevated plateau of western South 

 America. 



In his Chronica del Peru, a journal Avritten from night to night 

 while his comrades were sleeping, Cieza de Leon describes the papas 



™ See Safford, W. B. Food plants and textiles of anciont America, in Troceedings of 

 Uie 19th International Congress of Americanists, pp. 12-30, 1917. 



