A view of Lake Titicaca (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
For reasons that will shortly be obvious, I\u2019m amassing a few notes for myself about various Peruvian subjects. \u00a0I make no claim whatever to any scholarly originality; they\u2019re entirely derivative from online sources. \u00a0But I thought that I would share what I\u2019ve learned:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The simple and familiar potato has a fascinating history.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
It seems to have been initially domesticated somewhere in the area of modern southern Peru and the very far northwest of Bolivia\u2014in other words, in the vicinity of Lake Titicaca\u2014between 8000 BC and 5000 BC.\u00a0 However, for pretty obvious reasons, potatoes are difficult to trace archaeologically, so the earliest verifiable evidence of the potato known thus far comes from the central Peruvian coast, in the Anc\u00f3n district of northern Lima Province.\u00a0 That evidence dates to approximately 2500 BC.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the Peruvian and Bolivian \u201cAltiplano,\u201d the \u201cHigh Plain\u201d or \u201cHigh Tableland,\u201d potatoes served as the principal source of edible energy for the predecessors of the Inca and then, starting in the thirteenth century, for the Inca civilization itself.\u00a0 They ate them mashed, boiled, baked, and stewed.\u00a0 (Curiously, the shape of the potato also seems to have influenced ancient ceramic pottery design.)<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
When the Spanish conquered the Inca Empire in the sixteenth century, they readily saw the advantages of the potato and adopted it for their own use\u2014first in the Andean region itself and then introducing it to Europe.\u00a0 It arrived in Spain in approximately 1570 and in the British Isles around 1590.\u00a0 (This was a small but not insignificant part of what is sometimes called the \u201cColumbian exchange\u201d or \u201cColumbian interchange,\u201d the world-altering transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, diseases, and ideas between the Americas, West Africa, and the Old World that occurred in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.)<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
At first, European farmers weren\u2019t especially eager to cultivate potatoes, but\u2014owing to its low rate of spoilage, its hunger-satisfying bulk, and its cheapness\u2014it eventually became a major staple crop, displacing turnips and rutabaga.\u00a0 Conservative estimates are said to credit its arrival for approximately 25% of Old World population growth and urbanization between 1700 and 1900.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
However, such heavy dependence on the potato carried considerable risk.\u00a0 While thousands of potato varieties existed (and still exist) in the Andes, where a single family alone might raise several dozen of them, very few varieties were brought to Europe, leading to a striking lack of genetic diversity that, in turn, left the European potato crop highly vulnerable to disease.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
And, unfortunately, disease came.\u00a0 In 1845, a plant malady called \u201clate blight\u201d began its catastrophically rapid march through poor areas of western Ireland as well as certain parts of the Scottish highlands.\u00a0 The \u201cGreat Famine\u201d or the \u201cIrish Potato Famine,\u201d as it is often called, killed about a million people\u2014the most devastating loss of life in nineteenth-century European history\u2014and led another million or perhaps even two million to emigrate (mostly, it seems, to the New World).\u00a0 As a result, the population of Ireland dropped by between 20% and 25%.\u00a0 And that population decline continued in Ireland over the next century.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Another impact:\u00a0 The most severely affected areas were the west and south of Ireland, the principal regions where Irish Gaelic was still spoken. \u00a0\u00a0That language had already been fading in the east of the country, owing to the rise or imposition (for various reasons) of English.\u00a0 Now it was weakened yet again.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 For reasons that will shortly be obvious, I\u2019m amassing a few notes for myself about various Peruvian subjects. \u00a0I make no claim whatever to any scholarly originality; they\u2019re entirely derivative from online sources. \u00a0But I thought that I would share what I\u2019ve learned: \u00a0 The simple and familiar potato has a fascinating history. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>