The other crops

No other American crop can claim such a stature in prehistory as maize and only some of the more important ones can be listed here, together with the small suite of domestic animals. Squashes, of which there were six domesticated species in the Americas, were clearly domesticated several times, presumably independently, in a number of regions, including the Eastern Woodlands, Mesoamerica, and South America (Figure 8.1) (Whitaker 1983; King 1985; Sanjur et al. 2002). The ca. 10,000- year-old AMS-dated seed of Cucurbita pepo in the cave of Guila Naquitz in Oaxaca raises the possibility that squashes, and the gourds also found in Guila Naquitz, could have been manipulated by humans from a very early period indeed (Flannery 1986; Smith 1997b). The gourds most probably served as containers rather than food. The seeds of these plants could very easily have been selected and replanted to promote desired characteristics, and also passed from group to group over very large distances, long before the beginnings of any systematic cultivation.

Beans also come in several useful species and had multiple loci of early domestication. Direct dates for these tend to be much younger than for squashes or maize, and the oldest occurrences would appear to be in Late Preceramic sites postdating 2500 BC in Peru and Ecuador (as also for cotton), and only 1000 BC in the Early Formative of Mexico (Smith 1995:163, 2001).` Beans appear to be younger than maize in the southwestern USA, and none reached the northeastern USA until about AD 1300 (Hart et al. 2002).

Of other crops, manioc (cassava) pollen is claimed with maize pollen from the Belize lowlands at about 3000 Bc, and perhaps 5000 BC in the Gulf lowlands of Tabasco (Pohl et al. 1996; Pope et al. 2001). A charred manioc tuber from the site of Cuello in Belize has been AMS radiocarbon dated to about 600 BC (Hather and Hammond 1994). Piperno and Pearsall (1998) indicate the presence of manioc in Amazonia, its presumed homeland, by at least 2000 BC, and Donald Lathrap earlier made impassioned pleas for manioc to be regarded as the foundation crop for the whole cultural sequence of the agricultural Americas. Olsen and Schaal (1999) have recently sourced domesticated manioc using genetic markers to the southwestern Amazon in Brazil, close to the

eastern borders of Peru and Bolivia (Figure 8.1).

Presumed homelands for some other food crops are also shown in Figure 8.1, a map that highlights the diffuseness of agricultural crop origins in the Americas. Yet there are two regions that could well have served as quite focused centers for the domestication of a range of localized crops and domestic animals. One is the highland Andes from central Peru down into Bolivia, between Lakes Junin and Titicaca (Roosevelt 1999b; Shimada 1999). For this region, Bruce Smith (1995) draws together a convincing case for a combined domestication, perhaps commencing around 2000 BC, of the white potato, the chenopod grain crop quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa), the meatand woolproducing and pack-carrying llamas and alpacas, and the humble guinea pig. Duccio Bonavia (1999) believes that camelids and guinea pigs could even have been under some form of domesticatory selection in highland Peru as early as 3500 BC. Remains of quinoa occur together with squash and peanut in occupations in the Nanchoc Valley in northern Peru, apparently predating 4500 BC, but they are of uncertain domesticatory status at this time (Dillehay et al. 1997).

The other region of food-crop origin is the Woodlands of the central-eastern USA, focused on the basins of the Missouri, Ohio, and Middle Mississippi rivers, where a number of grain and oil crops were domesticated after 2000 BC. These crops include such delicacies as goosefoot, knotweed, maygrass, and marsh elder, to which were added the more widespread gourd, squash, and sunflower. The discovery of this independent complex of early agriculture has been one of the major recent achievements of US archaeological research and we return to it in more detail below. Indeed, it serves as a reminder that major developments in prehistory can sometimes be hidden from science for a very long time, a salutory observation for those endeavoring to recognize global patterns from the archaeological record.