Papa and chuño — the Andean tuber and its freeze-dried form in the Spanish record

Three printings read here — Seville 1553, Seville 1590 and the Madrid reissue of Garcilaso — describe the papa, the frost-and-tread process that turns it into chuño, and the trade in that chuño which supplied the mines of Potosí. The technology recorded is Andean, not Spanish; what is Spanish is that it was set in type in Europe within twenty years of the conquest of Peru. Modern literature supplies the route out of the Andes and the famine at the far end of it.