Coca in the Spanish record: the earliest printed descriptions of an eight-thousand-year-old crop, and the trade they priced

Monardes in 1580 and Acosta in 1590 printed the first detailed European accounts of coca: how it is sown, dried, chewed with lime, and what it did for people who walked on it. Acosta also priced the Potosí trade at over half a million pesos a year and wrote that the traffic cost the Indians "no poco trabajo, ni aun pocas vidas". Museum genomics has since shown the crop was domesticated two or three times from a wild Amazonian progenitor.