Proto-ajiaco (pre-chicken Muisca highland stew proto-layer) Period COrigin theory CVerified

What this entry describes is not today's chicken ajiaco but the old highland stew beneath it—the native stew simmered on the Bogotá plateau long before the Spanish conquest, the layer that underlies the dish before chicken was added.

This stew was shaped by long-established native ingredients: potato, maize, and the native herb known as guascas. Each was cultivated in the Andean highlands from early times and stood on the everyday table. The Muisca (Chibcha) people, before the conquest, simmered these in earthenware pots as the food of the highland home. Centered on tubers and grain and scented with greens, this stew stands in the line of a cooking long rooted in this land—cooking tubers, grain, and greens in clay vessels.

The ingredients and the tools were long at hand on this plateau. Paleodietary research shows that the native highland diet of the Bogotá plateau—tubers at its center, with maize added—reaches back to an antiquity traceable by radiocarbon and stable isotopes. The form of the stew is genuinely old here.

It should be said that what this old layer shows is the antiquity of a highland-stew type, not today's ajiaco itself. The chicken-based dish known today as ajiaco santafereño cannot do without the chicken that came across from the Old World in the sixteenth century, after the Spanish conquest. Depending on which dish one speaks of, the story of its antiquity changes entirely.

Two views are set down here about this old stew, and they are not related as one being right and the other wrong. What differs is which antiquity each is speaking of.

The first is the view of continuity. Long before the conquest, the Muisca (Chibcha) people on the Bogotá plateau ate a highland stew of potato, maize, and native herbs simmered in earthenware pots—and this native layer forms the foundation of today's ajiaco. A dietary reconstruction drawing on Spanish chronicles as primary sources depicts the pre-conquest Muisca cooking native tubers, grain, and greens in pottery and stone vessels. Recent peer-reviewed archaeology has traced, at sites such as Tequendama and Aguazuque, a diet centered on tubers and plants reaching back more than ten thousand years, with maize joining later, dated by radiocarbon. That a Muisca population on the eve of the conquest (AD 1000 to 1400) ate maize and native plants has also been confirmed by paleodietary isotope analysis. The antiquity of the stew is affirmed here head-on.

The second is the view of a break. It does not deny that the native stew is old. But the chicken that defines today's ajiaco santafereño is of Old World stock, and it came across to this land after the Spanish conquest, in the sixteenth century. That Old World chickens were carried to the Americas through the Spaniards and the slave trade is shown, too, by sources on this era when living things and crops crossed between continents. So to take the old native stew as identical to today's ajiaco is a mistake; the chicken-based dish of today came into being after chicken reached this land. The older layer of the prehistory is set apart from today's ajiaco as a native highland stew without chicken.

Both views still rest at the level of differing opinion in their degree of certainty. The exact date of the native stew itself, and the earliest record of using a native herb like guascas, are thin in firm sources and remain unsettled.