The Initial Domestication of Cucurbita pepo in the Americas 10,000 Years Ago
Abstract
Squash seeds, peduncles, and fruit rind fragments from Archaic period stratigraphic zones of Guilá Naquitz cave in Oaxaca, Mexico, are assigned to Cucurbita pepo on the basis of diagnostic morphological characters and identified as representing a domesticated plant on the basis of increased seed length and peduncle diameter, as well as changes in fruit shape and color, in comparison to wild Cucurbita gourds. Nine accelerator mass spectrometer radiocarbon dates on these specimens document the cultivation ofC. pepo by the inhabitants of Guilá Naquitz cave between 10,000 to 8000 calendar years ago (9000 to 7000 carbon-14 years before the present), which predates maize, beans, and other directly dated domesticates in the Americas by more than 4000 years.
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REFERENCES AND NOTES
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The Guilá Naquitz cucurbit assemblage is now curated at the Laboratorio de Paleobotánica, Instituto Nacional de Antropologı́a e Historia (INAH), Mexico, Distrito Federal. The rind, seed, and peduncle specimens illustrated in the original analysis (9) are not present in the INAH collections. As a result, the rind and peduncle specimens illustrated in (9) are not included in this analysis. Seed measurements provided in (9), however, are included in Fig. 1.
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The as yet undated large peduncle from zone C (Fig. 1) may indicate an even earlier increase in fruit size, given that it is from the same provenience (E9) as the domesticated C. pepo seed that yielded an AMS radiocarbon date of 8910 14C years B.P. (Table 1 and Figs. 1 and 2C).
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Figure 1 is by M. Bakry and Fig. 2 photographs are by C. Hansen. I thank INAH for permission to sample Guilá Naquitz specimens for AMS 14C dates; F. Sànchez, director of the Laboratorio de Paleobotánica, INAH, and J. L. Alvarado for their kind hospitality and their consultation on the analysis; J. L. Alvarado, D. Decker-Walters, K. Flannery, G. Fritz, L. Kaplan, L. Newsom, F. Sanchez, P. J. Watson, and M. Zeder for comments on the manuscript; and Y. Sugiura and C. Castillo, without whose assistance this research would not have been possible.
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Published In
Science
Volume 276 | Issue 5314
9 May 1997
9 May 1997
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Received: 28 January 1997
Accepted: 4 March 1997
Published in print: 9 May 1997
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