The people of Yuraj Molino (“white mill”) live surrounded by wheat fields, in a large valley near the small town of Pocona, Bolivia. As the name suggests, there have been flour mills in Yuraj Molino for some time. But by the late 1970s, customers were complaining of how long it took to grind the wheat; they got tired of waiting all day for their flour. And then millers began to notice that with the warmer, dryer climate, the streams no longer carried as much stream water, to power the mills. Some of the mills closed. Ana and I visited the ruins of a miller’s house, the yard full of weeds, with the mill still there and a calendar for 1984 still on the wall.
Other mills survived. Local miller Juan Torrico showed us his old mill house, with the canal that once brought water from the mountains. In 2001, Juan’s brother Sergio designed a new mill at the mill house. He bought two large, new stones from a master craftsman near Epizana, Cochabamba, who still carves the massive limestone wheels. Sergio bought a diesel engine, and a used truck axel. The brothers built a new mill house and mounted the stones in it, fixed the axel upright below them, and then used a steel rod to connect the axel to the diesel engine, which Sergio put in the next room. This way they kept the diesel smoke and the engine noise out of the mill room. They don’t want the smoke to spoil the delicate flavor of the flour, which people love.
Five or six other mills in the valley are also sited where old water mills used to be, near running water. But most of them are also now powered by diesel motors.
One by one the old water mills around Pocona adapted to diesel, and one or two are still using water power. The change to diesel was gradual and there was never a break in service, never a time when the farmers had no mills to go to. The mills themselves also stayed in the same places. Although the mills were originally sited to be near water, they were also near the wheat fields, and the millers owned the land where their mills were, and they had community ties to the area. So, the diesel mills stayed right where the water mills had been.
There is no research institution providing expertise on how to motorize Bolivian water mills. At some point, the millers themselves had to blend their traditional knowledge with a lot of new information about motors and old truck parts. As always, people in rural areas are constantly creating and making sophisticated adaptations to changing conditions.
A mystery unfolds around Mount Sajama, the highest point in Bolivia (6542 meters), a gorgeous snowcapped volcano. Even the base of the mountain is really high: 4200 meters, making the surrounding area too cold for farming, even though it is in tropical latitudes. And in ancient times, only farmers made grand monumental art. Yet the landscape around Mount Sajama is crisscrossed by some 10,000 km of perfectly straight lines, made by ancient people.
The lines are so poorly known that few people in Bolivia have heard of them. Many of the lines are in the Sajama National Park, although they are ignored in park literature. Yet the lines are clearly visible from the air, as I noticed last year when flying over them. They look a bit like giant, interlocking asterisks.
So, on a recent trip to Sajama, Ana and I were able to see that the lines up close. Up close, they look like roads, about 3 meters wide, stripped of all vegetation. Many lines run to hilltops. Some run far up the slopes of the highest mountains, but still end a long way from the icy peaks. Even today those peaks are impossible to climb, except by highly skilled (and slightly crazy) mountaineers.
From the Nazca Lines to the Pyramids of Giza, ancient monuments were made by agrarian societies. The labor came from off-season farmers. Unskilled workers, specialists and priests were all fed with harvests wrested from farmers. But the area around Sajama is cold for most of the year. In April we woke up to a frost so thick that it covered the backs of the llamas with ice, like a blanket. Not even the hardy, native quinoa will grow here. Not even barley, which grows in the high, cold Alps. So local people continue to pasture large herds of llamas, like their ancestors before them. Hamlets are few, and far between.
Where did the labor come from to build these lines? Did workers migrate in seasonally, carrying their food with them?
On the ground, the lines look like nothing more than a band of sandy soil, where the native brush has been removed. It would have been an unimaginable amount of work to dig out all the deep-rooted needle grass and t’ola plants without steel tools. Millions of people-hours of labor. And, why have the plants not grown back in the last 500 years or so? The volcanic soil around the lines seems to have been only lightly disturbed. Are native plants really so slow to regenerate in this forbidding environment?
The lines are as straight as if made with a theodolite, even when crossing rivers or moving across slopes. Many of the lines come together at the small colonial churches. No doubt the sixteenth century chapels were built on the sites that the native people already held sacred, as jealous priests sought to co-opt the spiritual places of the Andean peoples.
The University of Pennsylvania conducted research on the lines a decade ago, but I’ve been unable to find one of their publications. Why this grand desert site is so under-researched is perhaps as great a wonder as the lines themselves.
It was only a century ago that one of the oldest and most nutritious of human food crops began evolving into a global commodity, along the way becoming implicated in problems with genetic engineering, deforestation, and water pollution.
In an engaging world history of soy, Christine Du Bois tells how the bean was gathered and eaten in Manchuria, in northeastern China, at least 9000 years ago, and has been domesticated for at least 5000 years. Ancient (or at least medieval) recipes include tofu (from China), the intriguing, heavily fermented temprah (from Indonesia) and soy sauce (from Japan, but sold in Britain by the 1600s).
Henry Ford was one of the first to grasp the industrial potential of the crop and promoted it to make engine oil and plastics. His motor company was making plastic car parts from soy, and today we might have vegetal automobiles, had DuPont not created plastic from petroleum. DuPont’s plastics might have left American soy farmers with extra beans on their hands, if not for people like Gene Sultry, who started the first soy mill in Illinois in 1927, to crush the beans and extract oil (e.g. for margarine), leaving the crushed beans as animal feed. Sultry travelled the midwestern US with a six-car soy information train, complete with a lecture hall and two theater cars, where farmers watched films explaining how and why they should grow the new crop.
In one of the ironies of post-World War II economics, the USA began exporting large quantities of soy back to its Asian center of origin, first as relief food, but soon Japanese farmers learned to factory farm chickens and pigs on the US model, and feed them with imported, American soy.
This important new trade was upset by Richard Nixon, who in 1973, in the face of rising food prices, briefly banned the export of soy. This startled the Japanese into seeking supplies elsewhere. They began to support the research and development of soy in Brazil, a country that previously grew very little soy. The Japanese and Brazilian researchers were soon breeding locally adapted varieties and learning how to add lime to acidic soils, so that the dense forests of Mato Grosso could be felled for soy.
The crop soon spread to neighboring Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia. This vast soy-producing area in South America is the size of a large country, and is sometimes sarcastically called “the Republic of Soy”. Besides habitat destruction, soy displaced native peoples and smallholders as industrial farmers moved onto their land, sowing thousands of hectares. Soy can, of course, be grown by smallholders; Eric Boa and I were fortunate enough to visit some family farmers in 2007 who were happily growing soy on 20 to 30-hectare plots in Bolivia.
It is the large scale of soy that shows its nastier side. The bean has been genetically modified to make it resistant to Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup (glyphosate). Almost all soy now grown in North and South America is genetically modified. Runoff from chemical fertilizer has created a large, dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In the midwestern USA, soy-fed pigs create mass amounts of liquified manure that builds up in “hog lagoons”, frequently spilling over into rivers. The logical solution would be to use the manure as fertilizer, cutting back on chemicals, but this would entail keeping water out of the manure while cleaning barns, and then hauling the organic fertilizer over long distances.
The US government subsidizes the insurance industry to the tune of $30 billion a year, buffering American soy farmers from risk—a type of farm welfare that benefits those with the most soy, and the most land. These subsidies depress the world price for soy, making it harder for farm families in Africa and elsewhere to get the best prices for their soy.
Yet soy is a versatile food crop that can be made into thousands of tasty and nutritious dishes. It fixes nitrogen from the air, allowing less use of chemical urea as fertilizer. It can be grown profitably by smallholders, if they are protected from land-grabbers, and if governments do not subsidize large-scale farmers.
Brazil is now making efforts to limit further deforestation for soy. Other steps could be taken to rationalize soy’s fertilizer cycle and alternatives for weed control. A crop which has been implicated in so much damage could still be farmed and eaten in environmentally sound ways.
Further reading
Du Bois, Christine M. 2018 The Story of Soy. London: Reaktion Books. 304 pp.
Videos on soy
vea la versión en español a continuación
Bolivian agronomist Genaro Aroni first told me how quinoa was destroying the southwest Bolivian landscape some 10 years ago, when he came to Cochabamba for a writing class I was teaching. Ever since then I wanted to see for myself how a healthy and fashionable Andean grain was eating up the landscape in its native country.
I recently got my chance, when Paul and Marcella and I were making videos for Agro-Insight. Together with Milton Villca, an agronomist from Proinpa, we met Genaro in Uyuni, near the famous salt flats of Bolivia. Genaro, who is about to turn 70, but looks like he is 55, told us that he had worked with quinoa for 41 years, and had witnessed the dramatic change from mundane local staple to global health food. He began explaining what had happened.
When Genaro was a kid, growing up in the 1950s, the whole area around Uyuni, in the arid southern Altiplano, was covered in natural vegetation. People grew small plots of quinoa on the low hills, among native shrubs and other plants. Quinoa was just about the only crop that would survive the dry climate at some 3,600 meters above sea level. The llamas roamed the flat lands, growing fat on the native brush. In April the owners would pack the llamas with salt blocks cut from the Uyuni Salt Flats (the largest dry salt bed in the world) and take the herds to Cochabamba and other lower valleys, to barter salt for maize and other foods that can’t be grown on the high plains. The llama herders would trade for potatoes and chuño from other farmers, supplementing their diet of dried llama meat and quinoa grain.
Then in the early 1970s a Belgian project near Uyuni introduced tractors to farmers and began experimenting with quinoa planted in the sandy plains. About this same time, a large-scale farmer further north in Salinas also bought a tractor and began clearing scrub lands to plant quinoa.
More and more people started to grow quinoa. The crop thrived on the sandy plains, but as the native brushy vegetation grew scarce so the numbers of llamas began to decline.
Throughout the early 2000s the price of quinoa increased steadily. When it reached 2500 Bolivianos for 100 pounds ($8 per kilo) in 2013, many people who had land rights in this high rangeland (the children and grandchildren of elderly farmers) migrated back—or commuted—to the Uyuni area to grow quinoa. Genaro told us that each person would plow up to 10 hectares or so of the scrub land to plant the now valuable crop.
But by 2014 the quinoa price slipped and by 2015 it crashed to about 350 Bolivianos per hundredweight ($1 per kilo), as farmers in the USA and elsewhere began to grow quinoa themselves.
Many Bolivians gave up quinoa farming and went back to the cities. By then the land was so degraded it was difficult to see how it could recover. Still, Genaro is optimistic. He believes that quinoa can be grown sustainably if people grow less of it and use cover crops and crop rotation. That will take some research. Not much else besides quinoa can be farmed at this altitude, with only 150 mm (6 inches) of rain per year.
Milton Villca took us out to see some of the devastated farmland around Uyuni. It was worse than I ever imagined. On some abandoned fields, native vegetation was slowly coming back, but many of the plots that had been planted in quinoa looked like a moonscape, or like a white sand beach, minus the ocean.
Farmers would plow and furrow the land with tractors, only to have the fierce winds blow sand over the emerging quinoa plants, smothering them to death.
Milton took us to see one of the few remaining stands of native vegetation. Not coincidentally, this was near the hamlet of Lequepata where some people still herd llamas. Llama herding is still the best way of using this land without destroying it.
Milton showed us how to gather wild seed of the khiruta plant; each bush releases clouds of dust-like seeds, scattered and planted by the wind. Milton and Genaro are teaching villagers to collect these seeds and replant, and to establish windbreaks around their fields, in an effort to stem soil erosion. I’ve met many agronomists in my days, but few who I thought were doing such important work, struggling to save an entire landscape from destruction.
Acknowledgement
Genaro Aroni and Milton Villca work for the Proinpa Foundation. Their work is funded in part by the Collaborative Crop Research Program of the McKnight Foundation.
Related blog stories
Scientific names
Khiruta is Parastrephia lepidophylla
DESTRUYENDO EL ALTIPLANO SUR CON QUINUA
Jeff Bentley, 30 de diciembre del 2018
El ingeniero agrĂłnomo boliviano Genaro Aroni me contĂł por primera vez cĂłmo la quinua estaba destruyendo los suelos del suroeste boliviano hace unos 10 años, cuando vino a Cochabamba para una clase de redacciĂłn que yo enseñaba. Desde aquel entonces quise ver por mĂ mismo cĂłmo el afán por un sano grano andino podrĂa comer el paisaje de su paĂs natal.
Recientemente tuve mi oportunidad, cuando Paul, Marcella y yo hacĂamos videos para Agro-Insight. Junto con Milton Villca, un agrĂłnomo de Proinpa, conocimos a Genaro en Uyuni, cerca de las famosas salinas de Bolivia. Genaro, que está a punto de cumplir 70 años, pero parece que tiene 55, nos dijo que habĂa trabajado con la quinua durante 41 años, y que habĂa sido testigo del cambio dramático de un alimento básico local y menospreciado a un renombrado alimento mundial. EmpezĂł a explicar lo que habĂa pasado.
Cuando Genaro era un niño en la dĂ©cada de 1950, toda el área alrededor de Uyuni, en el árido sur del Altiplano, estaba cubierta de vegetaciĂłn natural. La gente cultivaba pequeñas parcelas de quinua en los cerros bajos, entre arbustos nativos (t’olas) y la paja brava. La quinua era casi el Ăşnico cultivo que sobrevivirĂa al clima seco a unos 3.600 metros sobre el nivel del mar. Las llamas deambulaban por las llanuras, engordándose en el matorral nativo. En abril los llameros empacaban los animales con bloques de sal cortados del Salar de Uyuni (el más grande del mundo) y los llevaban en tropas a Cochabamba y otros valles más bajos, para trocar sal por maĂz y otros alimentos que no se pueden cultivar en las altas llanuras. Los llameros intercambiaban papas y chuño de otros agricultores, complementando su dieta con carne de llama seca y granos de quinua.
Luego, a principios de la década de 1970, un proyecto belga cerca de Uyuni introdujo tractores a los agricultores y comenzó a experimentar con quinua sembrada en las pampas arenosas. Por esa misma época, un agricultor a gran escala más al norte, en Salinas, también compró un tractor y comenzó a talar los matorrales para sembrar quinua.
Cada vez más gente empezĂł a cultivar quinua. El cultivo prosperĂł en las llanuras arenosas, pero a medida que la vegetaciĂłn nativa de arbustos se hizo escasa, habĂa cada vez menos llamas.
A lo largo de los primeros años de la dĂ©cada de 2000, el precio de la quinua aumentĂł constantemente. Cuando llegĂł a 2500 bolivianos por 100 libras ($8 por kilo) en 2013, muchas personas que tenĂan derechos sobre la tierra en esta pampa alta (los hijos y nietos de los agricultores viejos) retornaron a la zona de Uyuni para cultivar quinua. Genaro nos dijo que cada persona araba hasta 10 hectáreas de t’ola para plantar el ahora valioso cultivo.
Pero para el 2014 el precio de la quinua comenzĂł a bajar y para el 2015 se colapsĂł a cerca de 350 bolivianos por quintal ($1 por kilo), a medida que los agricultores en los Estados Unidos y en otros lugares comenzaron a cultivar quinua ellos mismos.
Muchos bolivianos dejaron de cultivar quinua y regresaron a las ciudades. Para entonces la tierra estaba tan degradada que era difĂcil ver cĂłmo podrĂa recuperarse. Sin embargo, Genaro es optimista. Él cree que la quinua puede ser cultivada de manera sostenible si la gente la cultiva menos y usa cultivos de cobertura y rotaciĂłn de cultivos. Eso requerirá investigaciĂłn. No se puede cultivar mucho más que además de la quinua a esta altitud, con sĂłlo 150 mm de lluvia al año.
Milton Villca nos llevĂł a ver algunas de las parcelas devastadas alrededor de Uyuni. Fue peor de lo que jamás imaginĂ©. En algunas parcelas abandonados, la vegetaciĂłn nativa regresaba lentamente, pero muchas de las chacras que habĂan sido sembradas en quinua parecĂan la luna, o una playa de arena blanca, menos el mar.
Los agricultores araban y surcaban la tierra con tractores, sólo para que los fuertes vientos soplaran arena sobre las plantas emergentes de quinua, ahogándolas y matándolas.
Milton nos llevó a ver uno de los pocos manchones de vegetación nativa que queda. No por casualidad, esto estaba cerca de una pequeña comunidad de llameros, que queda en Lequepata. El pastoreo de llamas sigue siendo la mejor manera de usar esta tierra sin destruirla.
Milton nos mostrĂł cĂłmo recolectar semillas silvestres de la planta khiruta; cada arbusto libera nubes de semillas parecidas al polvo, dispersas y sembradas por el viento. Los Ings. Milton y Genaro están enseñando a los comuneros a recolectar estas semillas y replantar, y a establecer barreras contra el viento alrededor de sus campos, en un esfuerzo por detener la erosiĂłn del suelo. He conocido a muchos agrĂłnomos a travĂ©s de los años, pero pocos que en mi opiniĂłn hacĂan un trabajo tan importante en comunidades remotas, luchando para salvar un paisaje entero de la destrucciĂłn.
Agradecimiento
Genaro Aroni y Milton Villca trabajan para la FundaciĂłn Proinpa. Su trabajo es auspiciado en parte por el Programa Colaborativo de InvestigaciĂłn de Cultivos de la FundaciĂłn McKnight.
Historias de blog relacionadas
Nombres cientĂficos
Khiruta es Parastrephia lepidophylla
Vea la versión en español a continuación
The Inca Empire depended on a road system, called the Qhapaq Ă‘an, that linked its four regions from Ecuador to Chile, moving armies, laborers and food. Like beads on a necklace, the Qhapaq Ă‘an was studded with grain silos, called qollqas, where food could be stored.
The largest set of these qollqas is at Cotapachi, near Cochabamba in Bolivia, 1000 km from the ancient Inca capital of Cusco, Peru. Between 1450 AD and 1500 AD, the Inca Empire built 2500 granaries at Cotapachi, on a dry ridge overlooking a small lake in the Cochabamba Valley. According to David Pereira, archaeologist and expert on the qollqas, this site was part of a vast complex, with about 1500 more qollqas on other, nearby hilltops.
Each qollqa is about 2.5 meters in diameter at its stone base and could hold perhaps 4 tons of maize. They were originally about 3 meters tall, with gently tapered cylindrical walls woven from the stems of the ch’illka plant and plastered with mud and roofed with straw of the needle grass.
In 2007, 27 of the qollqas of Cotapachi were reconstructed, so to speak. They were designed by the architect Jorge Obando Stemberg and built by soldiers from the nearby Tumusla Regiment of the Bolivian Army. These replicas are made from adobe (mud) bricks, but they are kind of graceful in the afternoon sunlight, with the backdrop of the mountains.
Nothing is left of the other silos, except for rows and rows of stone bases.
From Cusco, the Inca could command the granary silos to be filled with maize grown in the green, irrigated fields of Cochabamba. The grain was carried to the garrison that guarded the southeast frontier at Inka Llajta, or it was sent to Cusco via the administrative settlement of Paria, in Oruro, Bolivia. A royal army passing through Cochabamba could provision its soldiers directly with the grain stored in the silos.
The grain was transported on llamas, which thrive on native Andean vegetation, but their slender backs can only carry a light pack of some 25 kg. You would need 160 llamas to haul the grain from one silo. It must have been a marvelous sight when thousands of pack llamas flowed like a river, up the stone slope to Inka Raqay, their first stop on the way to Cusco.
Like the Inka, all ancient states were built on the food and labor wrested from farmers. Some of the arrangements for commandeering and transporting that grain were as impressive as the cities they fed. The bases of grain silos may be humbler than ruined palaces, but it’s important to recognize that civilization is based on agriculture, and that farming does leave its mark on the archaeological record.
Notes
Thanks to David Pereira for sharing his insights about the Inca grain silos at Cotapachi.
The “-s” ending from Spanish is used today for Quechua plurals. In classical Quechua the qollqas would have been called “qollqakuna”.
The Inca, or Inka, was the supreme ruler of a state that was called “Tawantinsuyu,” meaning “all four quarters”.
There were actually more qollqas in the Mantaro Valley, in Peru, than in the Cochabamba Valley, but the silos in Mantaro were spread out over several sites.
Needle grass includes Stipa ichu and related species. It is called paja brava in Spanish, and ichhu in Quechua.
Ch’illka is Baccharis salicifolia.
Further reading
Eeckhout, Peter 2012 “Inca Storage and Accounting Facilities at Pachacamac.” Andean Past 10(1):12.
Gyarmati, János and Carola Condarco CastellĂłn. Circa 2012 “Las ocupaciones prehispánicas tardĂas y el centro administrativo inkaico en la Cuenca de Paria, Altiplano de Oruro.”
Earlier blog stories
Inka Raqay, up to the underworld
Related videos
The grain kept at Cotapachi may have been stored for a while, or sent soon after harvest to Cusco. Weevils, moulds and other post-harvest problems have always been a challenge, and still are. For videos on handling the maize harvest on a small farm see:
Managing aflatoxins in maize during drying and storage
Managing aflatoxins in maize before and during harvest
Storing and managing maize in a warehouse
Good storing and conserving maize grain
Good shelling, sorting and drying of maize
Harvesting maize in a good way
ALIMENTANDO AL IMPERIO INCAICO
El Imperio Incaico dependĂa de un sistema de caminos, llamado el Qhapaq Ă‘an, que unĂa sus cuatro regiones desde Ecuador hasta Chile, moviendo ejĂ©rcitos, trabajadores y alimentos. Como cuentas en un collar, el Qhapaq Ă‘an estaba tachonado de silos de grano, llamados qollqas, donde se podĂan almacenar los alimentos.
El conjunto más grande de estas qollqas está en Cotapachi, cerca de Cochabamba en Bolivia, a 1000 km de la antigua capital incaica de Cusco, Perú. Entre 1450 y 1500 AD, el Imperio Incaico construyó 2.500 graneros en Cotapachi, en una cresta seca con vista a un pequeño lago en el Valle de Cochabamba. Según David Pereira, arqueólogo y experto en las qollqas, este sitio formaba parte de un vasto complejo, con cerca de 1500 qollqas más en las otras cimas cercanas.
Cada qollqa medĂa unos 2,5 metros de diámetro en su base de piedra y podrĂa almacenar unas 4 toneladas de maĂz. Originalmente tenĂan unos 3 metros de altura, con paredes cilĂndricas suavemente cĂłnicas tejidas a partir de los tallos de la planta ch’illka y estucados con barro y techadas con paja brava.
En el 2007, 27 de los qollqas de Cotapachi fueron reconstruidos. Fueron diseñados por el arquitecto Jorge Obando Stemberg y construidos por soldados del cercano Regimiento de Tumusla del Ejército Boliviano. Estas réplicas están hechas de adobes, pero son elegantes a la luz de la tarde, con el fondo de la cordillera.
No queda nada de los otros silos, excepto filas y filas de bases de piedra.
Desde Cusco, los incas podĂan ordenar que los silos se llenaran de maĂz cultivado en los verdes campos irrigados de Cochabamba. El grano fue llevado a la guarniciĂłn que vigilaba la frontera sureste en Inka Llajta, o fue enviado a Cusco a travĂ©s del asentamiento administrativo de Paria, en Oruro, Bolivia. Un ejĂ©rcito real que pasaba por Cochabamba podĂa abastecer directamente a sus soldados con el grano almacenado en los silos.
El grano fue transportado en llamas, que prosperan en la vegetaciĂłn nativa andina, pero sus esbeltos lomos sĂłlo pueden llevar una mochila ligera de unos 25 kg. Se necesitarĂan 160 llamas para llevar el grano de un silo. Habrá sido una vista todo un espectáculo ver a los miles de llamas cuando fluyeron como un rĂo, por la ladera de piedra hasta Inka Raqay, su primera parada en el camino a Cusco.
Al igual que el Inka, todos los estados antiguos fueron construidos sobre los alimentos y la mano de obra arrebatada a los agricultores. Algunos de los arreglos para requisar y transportar ese grano eran tan impresionantes como las ciudades a las que alimentaban. Las bases de los silos de granos pueden ser más humildes que los palacios en ruinas, pero es importante reconocer que la civilización se basa en la agricultura, y que la agricultura deja su huella en el registro arqueológico.
Notes
Gracias David Pereira por compartir sus ideas sobre las qollqas de Cotapachi.
El sufijo “-s” del español se usa hoy en dĂa para plurales en quechua. En el quechua clásico las qollqas se habrán llamado “qollqakuna”.
El Inca, o Inka, era el gobernante supremo de un estado que se llamaba “Tawantinsuyu”, que significa “los cuatro cuartos”.
Hay más qollqas en el Valle de Mantaro, en el Perú, que en el Valle de Cochabamba Valley, pero los silos en Mantaro estaban dispersos en varios sitios.
La paja brava incluye Stipa ichu y especies relacionadas. Se llama ichhu en quechua y needle grass en inglés.
Ch’illka es Baccharis salicifolia.
Lectura
Eeckhout, Peter 2012 “Inca Storage and Accounting Facilities at Pachacamac.” Andean Past 10(1):12.
Gyarmati, János y Carola Condarco CastellĂłn. Circa 2012 “Las ocupaciones prehispánicas tardĂas y el centro administrativo inkaico en la Cuenca de Paria, Altiplano de Oruro.”
Earlier blog stories
Inka Raqay, up to the underworld
Related videos
El grano guardado en Cotapachi pudo haber sido almacenado por un tiempo, o enviado a Cusco poco despuĂ©s de la cosecha. Los gorgojos, mohos y otros problemas de pos-cosecha siempre han sido un desafĂo, y lo siguen siendo. Para ver videos sobre el manejo de la cosecha de maĂz en una pequeña granja, vea:
Manejo de aflatoxinas en maĂz durante el secado y almacenamiento
Manejo de aflatoxinas en el maĂz antes y durante la cosecha
Almacenar y manejar el maĂz en bodega
