How the history of peaches sheds light on change in North America after 1492

In the next day or two, I’ll be writing for all subscribers about some fantastic new papers that I’ve enjoyed reading in the last few weeks - they interlock with some of my historical interests for one reason or another. Hope you’ll find them as entertaining as I have.

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Today’s treat is an article about the spread of peaches in North America in the decades/centuries after the arrivals of Europeans in waves after Columbus’ crossing of the Atlantic in 1492.

Photo by Hamad Alahamad on Unsplash

I became interested in the spread of foods a while ago for a range of reasons: one was to do with tracking the ways humans changed ecologies in the past - and not only how we can track this through planting practices, but how doing so can also open up new ways of understanding the development and spread of language(s).

I am interested in the expansion of settlements in Eurasia that allow us to track networks of exchange that most scholars refer to as the Silk Roads. When I wrote a book about those networks a decade ago, I had not properly understood how important exchange was in pre-history, before even the creation of writing scripts. Articles about genetic exchange - and this one (by a group led by Paola Pollegioni) about the genetic structure of walnut populations and significant associations with ancient language phyla was hugely influential in my thinking.

Walnuts have hard casings, which make them survive a long time and make them invaluable sources of evidence and data. Peach stones are similar - highly durable and identifiable. Peaches also originate from Zhejiang province in China, so bring with them echoes of the Silk Roads (the famed Golden Peaches of Samarkand cost a small fortune in Tang dynasty China, more than a millennium ago).

Tracking them in North America is a wonderful way of looking at food networks as a methods to look at history - and, for what it’s worth, expanding ideas about Silk Roads exchange into global contexts.

It is likely that the first peaches were brought to North America by Spanish settlers, explorers and colonisers. However, the spread of peaches, identifiable and dateable using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry radiocarbon methods happened acorss the southeast of North America rapidly in the early to mid-16^th century. As the paper, by a group of scholars led by Jacob Holland-Lulewicz put it:

Along with our broader chronological modeling, these early dates suggest that peaches were likely in the interior prior to permanent Spanish settlement in the American Southeast and that peaches spread independently of interactions with Spanish colonizers.

Photo by Ian Baldwin on Unsplash

The paper is terrific, downplaying traditonal ideas that peach plants self-germinated or became naturalized and spread as a result; and in particular pointing out dating evidence that shows that peaches were being cultivated in places long before Spanish and other Europeans got there. Curiously, peaches were not adopted immediately; but - for whatever reason - they became established in the early 1600s in the Oconee Valley in the interior of what is now Georgia, in northern Florida, and in South Carolina.

In fact, peaches became ‘the first Afro-Eurasian domesticate, plant or animal, to be adopted by and spread through Indigenous communities’ and did so with such speed that ‘by the time Europeans were substantively making their way into the interior American Southeast in the middle to late 17^th century, dense peach orchards could be found around Indigenous communities, new and greater varieties of the fruit distinct from European strains could be identified.’

Not only that, note the authors; peaches had become so ubiquitous that ‘Indigenous people claimed that peaches were a Native plant species.’ Indeed, today ‘members of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation grow peaches as a heritage or heirloom crop, and the act of caring for these trees remains culturally important.’

As with walnut forests in Eurasia, the spread of peach trees ‘up the eastern seaboard to New York and Pennsylvania, and west across to Arkansas ‘ did not happen by chance. Although birds, deer and squirrels consume peaches, they are not the prime movers; humans were.

As the authors conclude, athough peaches were introduced to North America by European colonizers (who had themselves been introduced to peaches by Eurasian/Silk Roads exchange), their spread across the American Southeast was ‘a complex, multifaceted socioecological process driven primarily by the agency, decisions, and knowledge of Indigenous peoples and communities.’

That re-centres questions about ecological transformation, about land management, about knowledge exchange, cultivation and diet, as well as about trade networks and settlement patterns away from Europeans and back onto those who lived in North America before 1492 and the waves of change that followed. I wonder too if - as with walnuts - this will open up investigation into if, where and how languages evolved as peaches spread too.

All in all then, a terrific paper - one that makes you think. You can’t ask more than that if you study, are interested in or love history.