Quinoa. A millenary grain in Northern Argentina

BABOT, MARÍA DEL PILAR; HOCSMAN, SALOMÓN

Encyclopaedia of The History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures

Springer

Lugar: Heidelberg; Año: 2015; p. 1 - 17

Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) is a plant of a south-American origin able to flourish in poor soils and conditions regarded marginal for other crops. Its panicles contain a large number of grains basically composed of starch and rich in protein, mineral nutrients and oils. Since the first information collected by Armando Hunziker between the 1940s and 1970s, the background for pre-Hispanic cultivation and use of the quinoa in what is today Argentina has been considerably enlarged. The renewed interest in this plant in the last decade has drawn a more precise, though still fragmented, panorama of the millenary use of this south-American grain. Even though the southern Andes have been traditionally considered marginal regarding the agricultural development in the Central Andes, the new discoveries indicate that, quite on the contrary, a long tradition exists in the local use of this plant. Numerous findings of seeds and fragments of both panicles and stalks, as well as microscopic remains of this plant on ancient tools, are widely distributed in the western corner of Argentina, from the northern locations in Jujuy province until the Cuyo area in Mendoza province to the south. These findings resulted from the careful implementation of field and laboratory archaeobotanical techniques focused on the recovery of ancient botanical material from site sediments inasmuch as from the objects yielding microscopic residues of plant manipulation. In the Northern region, available information indicates the use of quinoa by the societies inhabiting several archaeological sites in the Puna, but also in the hillsides and valleys of arid or semiarid climate, the cloud forests and the Chaco environments nearby, far before the arrival of the Inka and European populations to the country. Historical chronicles as well as travellers tales give hints about its cultivation even in later Colonial and Republican times.