Spanish explorers may have brought the first peach pits to North America, but Indigenous communities helped the ubiquitous summer fruit really take root, according to a study led by a researcher at Penn State.
The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that Indigenous political and social networks and land use practices played key roles in the peach's adoption and dispersal across the continent, according to the researchers.
"Peaches need a lot of care by people to be productive. They need to be planted in appropriate places with a lot of sunlight and the right soil drainage, and they need to be pruned," said Jacob Holland-Lulewicz, first author and assistant professor of anthropology at Penn State. "For a long time, the narrative was that the Spanish introduced peaches and then peaches spread very quickly. The reality is way more complicated. How quickly peaches spread is very much 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The researchers analyzed historical documents that mentioned peaches, such as the travel writings of French missionary explorer Jacques Marquette and English merchant Jonathan Dickinson.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 employed 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, like carbonized tree wood, from 28 archaeological sites and two regional locales where archaeologists previously recovered preserved peach pits. The sites were located in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas.
