Behind every peach you bite into is the work of countless human generations.
The fluffy, sweet stone fruit dates back to China, where it has been cultivated for more than 8,000 years. Spanish colonists brought peaches to the Americas in the 1500s when they first explored southeastern North America, where they gained a foothold in what is now Georgia. Scientists know a lot about this summer symbol. But why have peaches become so popular in the United States? Research published in September nature communications They claim that after the fruit was introduced by Europeans, the peach spread across much of what is now the eastern United States with the help of indigenous peoples.
“Today, Georgia is the Peach State,” says botanist RaeLynn Butler, director of culture and humanities for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and co-author of the new study. “That heritage comes from a long history.” Much of that history comes from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and other indigenous communities that lived in the area when peaches first arrived in the Americas. .
“A lot of choices and agency by Indigenous peoples played a big role,” says Jacob Holland-Rulevitz, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University and co-author of the new study. They were also responsible for building the ecosystem and landscape to provide suitable habitat for peaches to grow, and they looked after the peach plants.
Dr. Holland-Rulevitz had been following reports of peach seeds being found at archaeological sites throughout the southeastern United States for years. Then, several years ago, he decided to compile these reports into something that could provide a more detailed picture of how the peach spread and shed light on the history of indigenous peoples that archeology had uncovered. Usually ignored or suppressed. “I started thinking about[fruit]as a trade commodity,” he says. “Perhaps we could use Peaches to track how Indigenous communities interact at very high resolution.”
The research team collected evidence from more than 20 archaeological sites and several early towns in the southeastern United States where at least one peach was discovered. Previous research in some of these locations had already determined when peaches were present. For sites where the age has not yet been determined, researchers used radiocarbon dating on other materials, either directly on the peach seeds or nearby, to determine where peaches may have been present. Identified high periods.
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However, this study only showed where peach seeds remained, not how people used the fruit or seeds. “We can’t see what people actually did with peaches and peach seeds, so we base our inferences on the archaeological record,” says the author, who studies the history of peaches in the Americas. says Kristen Gremillion, an archaeobotanist at Ohio State University. He was not involved in the new study.
Perhaps the most surprising dates the study authors identified date back to the early to mid-1500s and come from ruins in interior Georgia, where the ancestral Muskogean people lived for decades. Researchers believe the two peach pits found at the site date back to Hernando de Soto in 1540, one of a series of journeys made by groups of Spaniards during their first century in the Americas. They suggest that it may be related to early inland expeditions.
Beyond this outlier, peach pits do not appear to have reached interior Georgia until several decades later. Most of the earliest peaches, dating back to before 1600, came from coastal Florida and Georgia. Then, from 1625 to 1640, peaches spread throughout northern Florida and southern Georgia. By 1650, peaches had migrated to the rest of Georgia and eastern Alabama, as well as parts of North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. Researchers found that the fruit had reached Arkansas by the 1670s, and previous archaeological records indicate that peaches arrived in New York state before the early 18th century. are.
Holland-Rulevitz and her coauthors found this pattern both surprising and thought-provoking. Beginning in the 1560s, the Spaniards pivoted from occasional expeditions to planting roots in the Southeast, and only then did peaches appear to be doing the same. However, throughout the era of the Peach Migration, most Europeans in North America remained concentrated in small population centers along the coast. The prevalence of this fruit far exceeded Spanish colonization, suggesting that indigenous people rather than Spanish explorers and conquistadors did the work.
“This spread really started when the indigenous networks and the Spanish networks started intertwining with each other,” Holland-Rulevitz says. “From there, the peach spread through the remaining indigenous networks to communities and towns that had never even met the Spaniards yet.”
Given how quickly peach seeds spread and how long it takes for peach trees to bear fruit, he says indigenous people must have moved peach trees along existing networks. . “This land was a continent of active sociopolitical entities, communities, and nations,” says Holland-Rulevitz. “These relationships created a web of interactions across this continent. They were not isolated people living in the forest.”
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Roots and leaves of a peach seedling.
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The discovery is not surprising given Butler’s experience as a botanist and member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Her ancestors lived across present-day Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina until the 1830s, when the U.S. military took control of the southeastern Indian tribes often referred to as the Trail of Tears in Oklahoma. brutally forced upon the state.
The Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s relationship with the peach survived the trauma. This is evidence of the importance of this crop to the livelihoods of members of the eastern United States. For example, in this country, some of the timekeeping milestones observed in nature included the ripeness of peaches, Butler said. Her tribal town, Pakan Tallahassee, was named after the peach. She says her ancestors would have shared the peaches with other communities and tended the trees. That’s no mean feat, she points out. “It takes determination and perseverance,” Butler says.
Indigenous peoples would have been well equipped to grow peaches because of their experience with other tree crops, such as pawpaws and chestnuts, Holland-Rulewicz said. And indigenous practices such as burn management would have created open landscapes favored by sun-loving plants such as peaches.
The American Indian Removal Act of the 1830s uprooted Native Americans, including Butler’s ancestors. They carried peach seeds on the long journey west and are still tending the trees in Oklahoma. In the East, peach trees suddenly left untended sometimes became overgrown and did not bear much fruit. William Thomas Okie, a historian at Kennesaw State University who has written about peaches but was not involved in the study, said the fruit is often fed to pigs on farms or processed into cider. It is said that some individuals survived.
Despite the historical importance of peaches throughout the eastern United States, the modern peach industry, which began in the late 1800s, was preceded by another introduction of a particular large and attractive variety from Asia called the Chinese Kling. It’s related, Okie says. However, some of the commercialized varieties may be a mix of peach varieties grown by indigenous breeders in the southeastern United States before the evictions, with Chinese Kling and other latecomer varieties. he says.
Butler said future studies will look at different peach varieties, particularly those her country continues to grow in Oklahoma, to see if they are genetically related to the original fruit that spread to the eastern United States. I hope to be able to determine whether or not there is. It also applies to everyday life,” she says. “Everyone has enjoyed a peach at some point in their life, but they’ve probably never thought about how it got here.”
