A thriving kingdom in ancient Peru was feeding its agriculture with seabird feces centuries before European colonizers caught on to the material's value, reported Scientific American.
A study that appeared on Feb. 11 in the journal PLOS One found that people in Peru's Chincha Valley were spreading guano on their corn crops as far back as 1250 CE. That was more than a century before the Inca Empire came to prominence.
The Chincha Islands sit about 13 miles from Peru's shore and contain huge deposits of guano, a nitrogen-rich mix of seabird poop. By the nineteenth century, this "white gold" had become so prized that it fueled territorial expansion by the United States.
The people of the Chincha Valley, though, had figured out its agricultural benefits hundreds of years earlier.
Researchers reached their conclusions by studying the nitrogen, sulfur, and carbon isotope ratios in corn cobs recovered from that area. That chemical fingerprint, paired with seabird artwork found nearby, pointed to the use of a marine-based fertilizer dating back nearly 800 years.
For anyone interested in sustainable agriculture, this ancient practice offers a useful lesson. Centuries before modern chemistry, communities in the Chincha Valley built prosperity using a natural, locally available resource. That kind of ingenuity can inform today's conversations about farming without synthetic chemicals.
If you're looking for proof that working with nature rather than against it gets results, this 800-year-old strategy is a pretty convincing example.
"The origins of fertilization are important because soil management allowing large-scale crop production would have been key to allowing population growth," said Emily Milton, one of the study's authors who works as an environmental archaeologist with the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, as cited by Scientific American.
Jordan Dalton, an archaeologist at the State University of New York at Oswego who was not part of the study, told Scientific American that guano stood above all other options.
"There are obviously different types of fertilizers that one can use, but guano is the top of the top because it's so rich in nitrogen," she said.
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