We may think of potatoes as the most basic of foods, given their modern ubiquity and low cost, but in the Moche culture in ancient Peru, archaeologists had assumed they were highly charged symbols of the elite because they were found only in artifacts. New research, however, has shown that our understanding of New World potato consumption is biased by the fact the starchy vegetable is nearly always consumed in its entirety. In a forthcoming article in the Journal of Archaeological Science, researchers Guy Duke of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and Victor Vásquez-Sanchez and Teresa Rosales-Tham of...