Ancient civilizations-2

The cold as a resource

Beyond such skilled manipulation of the natural geography there lay an awareness of frost. As noted above, in the high Andes frost can occur almost every night of the year. Elsewhere people have endured the cold; in the Andes the cold was transformed into a positive and even creative factor.

It is not known when this step was taken. For at least 1,000 years people in the Andes have been aware that the sharp alternation between tropical noon and arctic midnight can be utilized. Any animal or vegetable tissue exposed to this daily contrast can be processed into nutritive products that keep for decades, and the process can be achieved either at the household or the state level.

Chuño is the name popularly used for processed tubers, but a rich vocabulary for tubers exists in the Quechuan (Andean) languages: there is a separate term for each plant and for each mode of preparation. Chuño cannot be made where a diurnal temperature extreme is absent; thus, north of modern Cajamarca in northern Peru no chuño is prepared, since nocturnal frosts are rare or absent. Animal tissues also can be handled in this manner. After 1532 European meats were added to those of local birds, fish, and camelids. The name for these preserved meats is charqui, or jerky (ch’arki in Quechua), the one Andean word that has made its way into common English usage.

Such food reserves allowed both the peasants and the state to compensate for natural and man-made calamities. They filled thousands of warehouses—many of which are still extant—that were built in ways and places so as to use the tiny differences of exposure to the sun, winds, and humidity. Those built by the state or by the ethnic lords along the more than 15,500 miles of roads provided food for both human and camelid porters, for the armies, and for priests traveling to the many shrines.

The presence of such large stores made possible the incredible forays of Spaniards like Diego de Almagro, who reached Chile from Cuzco across thousands of miles of deserts and snow-covered mountains. As late as 1547, 15 years after the Spanish invasion, one Spaniard, Polo de Ondegardo, reported that he had fed 2,000 soldiers for seven weeks with the food still stored above Xauxa, which had been the first European capital. A detailed archaeological study of an Inca storage system was made by the American anthropologist Craig Morris, who found almost 500 warehouses at Huánuco Pampa. There were some 1,000 warehouses at Xauxa and many more near Cuzco, the Inca capital.