Two small, wrinkled lumps of potato were found buried inside a ceramic jar on the floor of an ancient storage room on the arid southern coast of Peru, and they turned out to be roughly 500 years old, dating back to the height of the Inca Empire. The potatoes are a form of traditional Andean freeze-dried food known as chuño, and their discovery at a coastal site is what makes the find so archaeologically significant. Chuño can only be produced in the freezing highlands of the Andes mountains, hundreds of kilometres away from where these particular examples were unearthed, which means their presence at the coastal site is direct physical proof that the Inca were transporting preserved food across enormous distances to feed the workers and soldiers who kept their empire running. The study describing the find was published in the Journal of Field Archaeology by archaeologist Lidio Valdez of the University of Calgary and independent researcher Katrina Bettcher.
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