New research connects peach reach to indigenous communities

Long before there was a Peach State, indigenous communities saw the promise of peaches – originally introduced to North America by Spanish explorers. A new 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:

The researchers analyzed historical documents that mentioned peaches, such as the travel writings of French missionary explorer Jacques Marquette and English merchant Jonathan Dickinson.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.

The team found that peaches were likely widespread across Indigenous settlements in the interior southeast as early as the year 1620, roughly 100 years after the earliest Spanish expeditions in Florida and in Georgia’s Oconee Valley. The timing suggests that early Spanish settlements becoming important trade nodes within existing Indigenous networks created the necessary conditions for the spread of peaches, according to Holland-Lulewicz.

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“Understanding the path that the introduction of species, such as peach trees, took through colonization and the role that Indigenous people and their long-term relationship with the environment played in shaping these histories demonstrates the importance of these events, people and processes to what becomes a broader American history,” said co-author Victor Thompson, Distinguished Research Professor of archaeology at the University of Georgia (UGA) and executive director of the Georgia Museum of Natural History. “Further, the fact that all of this work took place on museum specimens underscores the importance of maintaining these collections for future study.”

Continue reading the PSU media release.

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