Nashville, Tennessee
July 2, 2007
Anthropologists working on the
slopes of the Andes in northern Peru have discovered the
earliest-known evidence of peanut, cotton and squash farming
dating back 5,000 to 9,000 years. Their findings provide
long-sought-after evidence that some of the early development of
agriculture in the New World took place at farming settlements
in the Andes. The discovery was published in the June 29 issue
of Science.
The research team made their discovery in the Ñanchoc Valley,
which is approximately 500 meters above sea level on the lower
western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru.
“We believe the development of agriculture by the Ñanchoc people
served as a catalyst for cultural and social changes that
eventually led to intensified agriculture, institutionalized
political power and new towns in the Andean highlands and along
the coast 4,000 to 5,500 years ago,” Tom D. Dillehay,
Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at
Vanderbilt University
and lead author on the publication, said. “Our new findings
indicate that agriculture played a broader role in these
sweeping developments than was previously understood.”
Dillehay and his colleagues found wild-type peanuts, squash and
cotton as well as a quinoa-like grain, manioc and other tubers
and fruits in the floors and hearths of buried preceramic sites,
garden plots, irrigation canals, storage structures and on hoes.
The researchers used a technique called accelerator mass
spectrometry to determine the radiocarbon dates of the
materials. Data gleaned from botanists, other archaeological
findings and a review of the current plant community in the area
suggest the specific strains of the discovered plant remains did
not naturally grow in the immediate area.
“The plants we found in northern Peru did not typically grow in
the wild in that area,” Dillehay said. “We believe they must
have therefore been domesticated elsewhere first and then
brought to this valley by traders or mobile horticulturists.
“The use of these domesticated plants goes along with broader
cultural changes we believe existed at that time in this area,
such as people staying in one place, developing irrigation and
other water management techniques, creating public ceremonials,
building mounds and obtaining and saving exotic artifacts.”
The researchers dated the squash from approximately 9,200 years
ago, the peanut from 7,600 years ago and the cotton from 5,500
years ago.
Dillehay published the findings with fellow researchers Jack
Rossen, Ithaca College, Ithaca, N.Y.; Thomas C. Andres, The
Curcurbit Network, New York, N.Y.; and David E. Williams, U.S.
Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C.
Dillehay is chair of the Department of Anthropology at
Vanderbilt, Professor Extraordinaire at the Universidad Austral
de Chile and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in 2007.
The research was supported by the Instituto Nacional de Cultura,
Lima; the National Science Foundation; the Heinz Foundation; the
University of Kentucky and Vanderbilt University.
Visit Exploration, the university’s multimedia online science
journal, at www.exploration.vanderbilt.edu for more Vanderbilt
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