Agricultural Settlement and Land Use in Mountains - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 573

throughout the winter. In the Andes, milk has never been an important food item be-
cause llamas and alpacas are relatively inefficient at lactation. For millennia, the Alti-
plano of Bolivia and Peru was used seasonally for cultivation, but permanent settlement
became possible at these altitudes only after the Andeans learned to freeze dry tubers
into chuño. This process takes advantage of the arid climate and nightly chill. Potatoes
are spread on the ground in the open night air and allowed to freeze, then submerged
in water the following morning. The process is repeated daily for several weeks until
the tubers become hard and black, at which point they are stored intact or mashed into
a white pulp for later use. In either case, they keep indefinitely. Since their introduc-
tion from the Andes in the sixteenth century, potatoes have become a major food source
throughout mountainous Eurasia, from the tropics to the higher latitudes. They are not
freeze-dried in the more northern mountains, but instead are stored in underground
cellars where cool, still air retards spoiling. Because it is one of the few dependable
and productive crops that grow at demanding high altitudes, the nutritious and versat-
ile potato is an important staple of traditional mountain societies the world over (Fig.
11.18).
FIGURE 11.17 Hay harvest near Zakopane, Tatra Mountains, Poland. (Photo by S. F. Cunha.)