The Indians spread the peach, which came from Spain, to North America.

Nov. 25 () –

The Spanish explorers were able to bring the first peach seeds to North Americabut indigenous communities helped this ubiquitous fruit really take root.

A new study, published in Nature Communicationsshows that indigenous political and social networks and land use practices played a key role in the adoption and dispersal of the peach across the continent, according to the researchers.

“Peaches (as this fruit is called in America) They need a lot of care from people to be productive. They should be planted in appropriate locations with plenty of sunlight and adequate soil drainage, and they should be pruned,” said Jacob Holland-Lulewicz, first author and associate professor of anthropology at Penn State. in a statement. “For a long time, the narrative was that the Spanish introduced peaches and then peaches spread very quickly. The reality is much more complicated. How quickly peaches spread is largely a product of indigenous networks and land management“.

The researchers analyzed historical documents that mentioned peaches, such as the travel writings of French missionary explorer Jacques Marquette and English merchant Jonathan Dickinson.

They also used radiocarbon dating (a method that measures the decay of radioactive carbon-14 atoms in organic material) to determine the approximate ages of peach pits and other organic samples, such as charred wood from trees, from 28 sites. archaeological sites and two regional localities where archaeologists previously recovered preserved peach pits. The sites were located in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas.

The team found that peaches were probably widespread in interior Southeast Indian settlements as early as 1620, about 100 years after the first Spanish expeditions in Florida and Georgia’s Oconee Valley. The moment suggests that the first Spanish settlements that became important commercial nodes within indigenous networks existing conditions created the necessary conditions for the propagation of peaches, according to Holland-Lulewicz.

“Many narratives talk about the arrival of the Spanish, or Europeans in general, and then you see instantaneous changes in indigenous stories and the spread of materials, but those initial interactions did not lead to major changes,” he said. “It was not until Spanish networks and indigenous networks intertwined 100 years later that we had the necessary conditions for the propagation of peaches”.

The team also identified what are possibly the first peaches in North America on a Muskogean farm in the Oconee Valley. In the 1990s, the late Penn State archaeologist James Hatch recovered peach pits from the bottom of post holes that once housed support structures for the farm house.

The researchers radiocarbon dated charcoal, nuts, and corn kernels from these postholes and found that occupation at the site began between 1520 and 1550 and ended between 1530 and 1570. This timing suggests that peaches had spread into the interior of the Southeast. likely decades before the founding of Saint Augustine in 1565, according to the researchers.

MORE VARIETIES THAN IN EUROPE

Indigenous peoples not only adopted the peach, but also They selectively bred new varieties that outnumbered the varieties found in Europe. even at this early time, Holland-Lulewicz said.

“When Europeans began moving across and into the interior of the continent in the mid- to late 17th century, they noticed that there were many more varieties of peaches grown by indigenous people than in Europe,” he said, explaining that the fruit had become in an important aspect of indigenous culture.

“Right now, Europeans are seeing really dense peach orchards around indigenous villages, but some of these villages and people had never interacted with Europeans before or even heard of them. In fact, There are records from indigenous peoples that describe peaches as an indigenous fruit.”

The fruit had become so integral to Indigenous history and culture that when the ancestors of today’s Muscogee (Creek) Nation were forcibly removed from Georgia and Alabama during the 19th century, they took the peaches with them.

“Today, there are Muscogee (Creek) peoples who grow peaches as heirloom crops,” Holland-Lulewicz said. “The act of growing and caring for these peaches is an important cultural practice. These were the first peaches introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries.