Spring 2007
Spicy Archaeology-Dr. Berman Uncovers Evidence of the Oldest Spice in the Americas
Chili peppers don’t leave much in the way of archaeological traces. But an international team of researchers including the anthropology department’s Mary Jane Berman has found a way to use starch microfossils to recognize where chili peppers were once stored and used.
The study, reported in the Feb. 16 issue of the journal Science, suggests that chili pepper (Capsicum species) is the oldest spice used in the Americas and one of the oldest in the world. The evidence shows 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.
"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.”
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, Hamilton campus).
The oldest positively identified starches were found by Berman’s colleagues 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.
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.
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."
