[Aztlan] NEWS STORY ON EARLIER DOMESTICATED SQUASH

[michael ruggeri]

Listeros,

The story about Dillehay discovering the earliest known domesticated  
squash in Peru dating back to 9200 BP may have been previously  
eclipsed by an earlier discovery in Ecuador.

Here is the story I posted at the time;

Mike Ruggeri

Public release date: 13-Feb-2003
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Contact: Dr. Dolores Piperno
pipernod at tivoli.si.edu
011-507-212-8101
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
An origin of new world agriculture in coastal Ecuador



New archaeological evidence points to an independent origin of  
agriculture in coastal Ecuador 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Suddenly,  
the remains of larger squash plants appear in the record. The Las  
Vegas site, described by Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian Tropical  
Research Institute (STRI) and Karen Stothert, University of Texas at  
Austin in the February 14th issue of Science, may predate plant  
domestication sites in the Mesoamerican highlands.
The fertile and amazingly diverse lowland tropics seem like a likely  
place for agriculture to develop. But few plant remains survive mold,  
high temperatures and rainfall. Luckily for archaeologists, one of  
the ways that plants protect themselves from herbivores and pathogens  
is to form hardened pieces of silica in their cells. These  
distinctive inclusions remain as tiny plant fossils called  
phytoliths, after plants die and decay.
Large phytoliths correspond to the large fruits of domesticated plant  
varieties in comparison to the smaller phytoliths present in their  
wild relatives.
Piperno and Stothert compared phytoliths from squash fruits they  
found in sites on the Santa Elena peninsula in Ecuador to others in a  
huge reference collection, including wild and cultivated squash  
species collected throughout the Americas. Larger phytoliths like  
those found in domesticated varieties of Cucurbita ecuadorensis, the  
only cucurbit squash native to Ecuador, were clearly evident in  
undisturbed strata dated to 10,130 to 9320 carbon-14 years (roughly  
12,000 to 10,000 calendar years ago).
The carbon remaining from plant cells that survives inside phytoliths  
was dated using new methods developed by the authors in collaboration  
with a radiocarbon laboratory.
Hunter gatherers in coastal Ecuador probably took advantage of  
resources from marine, mangrove and forest ecosystems, and began to  
domesticate wild squash varieties as they formed fairly stable  
settlements at the end of the Pleistocene, a plausible scenario for  
one of the most important economic and social passages of prehistory.

###
Piperno, D.R. and Stothert, K.E. Phytolith evidence for early  
domestication in southwest Ecuador. Science. Feb. 14, 2003.

Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, with  
headquarters in Panama City, Panama, study the past, present and  
future of tropical biodiversity and its implications for humankind.






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