Ancient Quinoa Cultivation, Harvesting and Post-harvesting in the Puna of Argentina, South-Central Andes (1600-1100 years BP).

BABOT, MARÍA DEL PILAR; ESTRADA, O; CATTANEO ROXANA; HOCSMAN, SALOMON

world tour

Simposio; 1. 2nd International Quinoa Research Symposium,; 2020

Washington State University

Many plant macro and microscopic remains related to Chenopodium spp. have been studied since 1999 in the Antofagasta de la Sierra area, Catamarca Province, within the Southern Puna of Argentina, in the southern portion of the South-Central Andes (Babot and Hocsman 2016). On this basis, initially, a processing and consumption of the grain by hunter-gatherers in transit to food production and by local agropastoralist societies, from ca. 4700-4500 years BP onwards, was established (Babot 2001, 2011; Rodríguez et al. 2006). However, it was not known whether quinoa was a local crop in these high-altitude deserts, at least in part of the temporal sequence, or whether the grains were the product of regional trade and exchange of goods, characteristic of these societies. In 2005 we began to study a set of large lithic instruments dated between ca. 1600 - 1100 years AP . These were defined as large knives that became sidescrapers as a result of the resharpening of the edges. The microscopic residues recovered from them (microfossils and chemical residues) allowed us to pose the hypothesis of specialized agricultural instruments in the harvest of pseudocereals (quinoa and kiwicha) and, indirectly, the cultivation of this plant (Babot et al. 2008; Escola and Hocsman 2011; Escola et al. 2013). Based on its anatomical and morphological characters (Arias et al. 2014), in 2006 we began to identify as related to Ch. Quinoa a series of herbaceous elements - stem fragments and terminal ends of panicles, which appeared isolated or next to the seeds at archaeological sites from ca. 3500 years BP onwards (Aguirre 2007; Escola et al. 2013; Rodríguez et al. 2006). This strengthened the hypothesis of the local harvesting of the plant since the stems would not be tradded. The identity of the seeds as Ch. quinoa was confirmed from a larger molecular study - allelic genotyping, which included samples from the last 18 centuries, from the same area (Winkel et al. 2018). Regarding the identification of the taxon in ancient agricultural fields, the low production of silicophytoliths in quinoa (Korstanje and Babot 2007) suggests that its identification could be random and ambiguous in these contexts. This task is just beginning.