The fiery past
Anthropologist finds chili peppers in the kitchen — 6,000 years ago
Years from now, anthropologists and archaeologists may go digging through the excavated remains of your kitchen, where they’ll debate the origins of elaborate ingredients or discuss the significance of takeout leftovers.
If it sounds far-fetched, consider the work of anthropology Professor Deborah Pearsall and her colleagues, including lead researcher Linda Perry of the Smithsonian. By analyzing stone tools — in some cases more than 6,000 years old — Pearsall, Perry and others have discovered the residue of chili peppers, an agricultural and cultural surprise for such an early time. The research was published in the Feb. 16, 2007 issue of Science.
Don’t judge the bad dishwashing habits of ancient people. To the anthropological community, this discovery — which solidifies chili peppers as being among the oldest domesticated foods in the Americas — is valuable information that has implications for everything from trade routes to cooking habits.
“It shows that there was, in fact, a fairly broad base of foods, even this early,” Pearsall says.
This tiny starch grain was lifted, through lab techniques, from a stone kitchen tool used more than 6,000 years ago. Researchers including Deborah Pearsall have discovered this starch to be Capsicum, or chili peppers, one of the earliest domesticated food sources in the Americas.
A mystery starch connects a continent
As with many scientific discoveries, this one started with an unknown. Pearsall worked specifically on data from two sites in Ecuador (one yielding the oldest results in the study) and one in the Bahamas (the youngest).
She and researchers at other sites took residue off such kitchen tools as stone grinders. In analyzing that residue, they found not only maize, a crop known to have come down from Mexico, but also a mystery starch — a microscopic blob invisible to the naked eye and common to samples from sites spread around the South American continent.
Perry, who had worked and trained with Pearsall previously, set about solving the mystery. The answer? The unknown starch was Capsicum, the genus of the chili pepper.
“It’s fascinating to think about how the chili peppers first got here and there,” Pearsall says. “None of them are native to the coast of Ecuador, so they were all introduced there more than 6,000 years ago, already domesticated.”
The peppers may have come from eastern South America first. Although the means are unknown, their presence in non-native lands shows some kind of exchange: “It really is another set of data, another line of evidence, to show that there were cultural contacts throughout the continent of South America very early.”
Experiments in farming and flavor
The implications go beyond cultural exchange, though. They say something about the lives of people at the sites, including those in Ecuador.
The area Pearsall examined was well-suited for early agriculture. It’s an ecotone: a transitional area between the dry deserts of Peru to the south and the wet rainforest to the north. “It’s dry enough that you can get a good burn if you’re a slash and burn agriculturalist, and yet there’s enough rainfall that you can grow things,” Pearsall says. “It’s a really nice balance.”
Good land brings the luxury to experiment, which may be why these people grew not only indigenous crops and staples such as maize, but also chili peppers. But it may have been as much about culinary experimentation as agricultural. Chili peppers would have brought vitamins to a diet, but they also would have brought flavor.
“It strikes me as being a situation where people had some freedom to experiment with food, so they weren’t on the brink of starvation or anything like that,” Pearsall says. “Why would you bother with chili peppers if you were starving?”