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Berman part of discovery: Chili pepper is the oldest spice in the Americas

02/23/2007

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Miami anthropologist Mary Jane Berman is part of an international team of researchers who report new fossil evidence showing that chili pepper (Capsicum species) is the oldest spice in use in the Americas and one of the oldest in the world. Chili peppers were cultivated and traded as early as 6,000 years ago, predating the invention of pottery in some areas of the Americas and millennia before Columbus' arrival to the Americas brought the spice to Europe from where it spread to the rest of the world. The discovery is reported in the Feb. 16 issue of the journal Science.

Berman, who is also director of Miami's Center for American and World Cultures, is one of 15 authors of the report, along with researchers from Venezuela, Canada and the U.S. Fossilized chili pepper starch grains - microfossils - were found at seven archaeological sites ranging from the Bahamas to southern Peru and dating from 6,000 years before present to European contact. Berman directed the excavation at the Three Dog Site in San Salvador, Bahamas, with assistant director Perry Gnivecki (anthropology, Miami Hamilton).

"Chili peppers were being grown and consumed in South America earlier than previously expected. This study pushes its appearance in the Caribbean to around the AD 700s-800s," says Berman. "Another important aspect for the Caribbean, where I work, is that while we have descriptions from Spanish chronicles about chili peppers ... we don't know when it arrived in the Caribbean. The Bahamas were the last islands in the Caribbean to have been colonized, so the idea is that chili peppers were brought to the Bahamas from Cuba and/or Hispaniola and must have been present there, too, dating back to even earlier periods."

The oldest positively identified starches were found at sites in southwestern Ecuador, occupied for more than a millennium beginning about 6,100 years before present. The Three Dog site, in the Bahamas, was occupied by a group of fisher-horticulturists about 1,000 years before present. Chili pepper starches were recovered from sediment samples, milling stones and food residues from ceramic sherds of cooking vessels. Linda Perry, of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and lead author of the study, identified these microfossils as residue from domesticated, not wild, chili species that in some spots even predated the invention of pottery.

"We now have a marker, in starch granules, that allows us to look back in time and demonstrate the widespread use of domesticated chili peppers throughout the Americas at much earlier times than previously documented," said Miami emeritus botanist W. Hardy Eshbaugh, a pepper expert not involved in the research. The starches of domesticated peppers are easily distinguishable from smaller wild types in the microfossil record, according to the study authors.

The microfossils suggest vitamin C-rich chilies were usually mixed with corn and a few other foods, not just used as a spice. "Maize and chilies occur together from the onset of this record until European contact and, thus, represent an ancient Neotropical plant food complex," reports Perry.

"It was people in tropical, lowland areas of what is now western Ecuador who first spiced up their cuisine, not those from higher, drier Mexico and Peru as was previously assumed," said Scott Raymond, a University of Calgary archeologist involved in the study. Peppers were farmed in the region more than 1,000 years before the plants were cultivated in Peru or Mexico, according to the study.

The authors report that the spice must have been transported over the Andes to what is now Ecuador, as the chilies only grew naturally to the east of the mountain range.

According to Berman, these findings help in understanding how people reproduce their homeland environments and daily practices when they colonize or settle new areas. "I expect that chili peppers were part of a larger 'package' of cultigens that the earliest migrants to the Caribbean brought with them from Central or South America. ... This will help us understand the subsistence economy of these people."