New World crops explained

New World crops are those crops, food and otherwise, that are native to the New World (mostly the Americas) and were not found in the Old World before 1492 AD. Many of these crops are now grown around the world and have often become an integral part of the cuisine of various cultures in the Old World. Notable among them are the "Three Sisters": maize, winter squash, and climbing beans.

List of crops

New World crops by plant structure used^[1]

Cereal	little barley, maize, maygrass, wild rice
Pseudocereal	amaranth, chia, knotweed, goosefoot, quinoa, sunflower, sumpweed (extinct as a crop)
Fruit	açaí, acerola, avocado, American blueberry, cashew apple, chayote, cherimoya, American cranberry, chili pepper, curuba, custard apple, Virginia strawberry, feijoa, fox grape, Muscadine grape, guava, huckleberry, jabuticaba, jerivá, jurubeba, macaúba, naranjilla, papaya, pawpaw, passionfruit, peppers, American persimmon, pineapple, pitanga, pitaya, prickly pear, soursop, squashes and pumpkins, sugar-apple, White sapote, Black sapote, Yellow Sapote, Babaco, Achacha, tamarillo, tomato, tomatillo, tucum Nuts: American chestnut, Araucaria, black walnut, Brazil nut, cashew, hickory, pecan, shagbark hickory, vanilla, Chilean Hazelnut, Ice Cream Bean, Peanut
Spices	Allspice
Seed crops	achiote, guaraná, cocoa bean Beans (legumes): common bean, lima bean, peanut, scarlet runner bean, tepary bean
Root	arracacha, jicama, canna, cassava, leren, sweet potato, yacón
Underground stems (tubers, rhizomes, bulbs etc)	arrowroot, sunroot, camas bulb, hopniss, mashua, oca, potato, ulluco
Leaf	agave, coca, tobacco, yerba mate, yucca
Fluid	balsam of Peru, chicle, maple syrup, rubber
Wood	logwood
Fiber	some cotton species

Timeline of cultivation

The new world developed agriculture by at least 8000 BC.^{[2] [3] [4]} The following table shows when each New World crop was first domesticated.

Timeline of cultivation

Date	Crops	Location
8000 BCE^[5]	Squash	Oaxaca, Mexico
8000–5000 BCE^[6]	Potato	Peruvian and Bolivian Andes
6000–4000 BCE^[7]	Peppers	Bolivia
5700 BCE^[8]	Maize	Guerrero, Mexico
5500 BCE^[9]	Peanut	South America
5000 BCE^[10]	Avocado	Mexico
c. 4200 BCE^[11]	Sea-island cotton	Peru
4000 BCE	Common bean	Central America
3400 BCE^[12]	Mexican cotton	Tehuacan Valley, Mexico
3300 BCE^[13]	Cocoa	Ecuador
3000 BCE	Sunflowers,^[14] other beans	Arizona–New Mexico
1500 BCE^[15]	Sweet potato	Altiplano Cundiboyacense, Colombia
500 BCE^[16]	Tomato	Mexico

Dissemination to the Old World

See also: Columbian Exchange. The transfer of people, crops, precious metals, and diseases from the Old World to the New World and vice versa is called the Columbian Exchange.

Food historian Lois Ellen Frank calls potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, chili, cacao, and vanilla the "magic eight" ingredients that were found and used only in the Americas before 1492 and were taken via the Columbian Exchange back to the Old World, dramatically transforming the cuisine there.^{[17] [18] [19]} According to Frank,^[20]

See also

• First agricultural revolution
• List of food plants native to the Americas
• Neolithic founder crops
• Timeline of agriculture and food technology

Notes and References

1. Book: Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel. W. W. Norton & Company. 1999. 126.
2. Book: Smith, A.F. . 1994 . The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery . University of South Carolina Press . 1-57003-000-6 . 13 .
3. Web site: Hirst . K. Kris . Plant Domestication – Table of Dates and Places . About.com . 15 June 2016 . 27 February 2017 . https://web.archive.org/web/20170227062445/http://archaeology.about.com/od/domestications/a/plant_domestic.htm . dead .
4. Piperno. Dolores, R.. Ranere. Anthony J.. Holst. Irene. Iriarte. Jose. Dickau. Ruth. 2009 . Starch grain and phytolith evidence for early ninth millennium B.P. maize from the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico . PNAS . 106 . 13 . 10.1073/pnas.0812525106 . 5019–5024 . 19307570 . 2664021 . 2009PNAS..106.5019P. free.
5. Smith . Bruce D. . Documenting plant domestication: The consilience of biological and archaeological approaches . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America . February 2001 . 98 . 4 . 1324–1326 . 10.1073/pnas.98.4.1324 . 11171946 . 33375 . 2001PNAS...98.1324S. free.
6. A single domestication for potato based on multilocus amplified fragment length polymorphism genotyping . Spooner . DM . . 102 . 41 . 10.1073/pnas.0507400102 . 1253605 . 14694–99 . 16203994 . 2005 . etal . 2005PNAS..10214694S. free.
7. Perry . Linda . Kent V. Flannery . Precolumbian use of chili peppers in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America . July 17, 2007 . 104 . 29 . 11905–11909 . 10.1073/pnas.0704936104 . 17620613 . 1924538 . 2007PNAS..10411905P. free.
8. Ranere . Anthony J. . Dolores R. Piper . Irene Holst . Ruth Dickau . José Iriarte . The cultural and chronological context of early Holocene maize and squash domestication in the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America . January 23, 2009 . 106 . 13 . 5014–5018 . 10.1073/pnas.0812590106 . 19307573 . 2664064 . 2009PNAS..106.5014R. free.
9. Web site: Earliest-Known Evidence Of Peanut, Cotton And Squash Farming Found . Science Daily . 4 November 2013 . June 29, 2007.
10. Galindo-Tovar, María Elena . Arzate-Fernández, Amaury M. . Ogata-Aguilar, Nisao . Landero-Torres, Ivonne . amp . 2007 . The avocado (Persea americana, Lauraceae) crop in Mesoamerica: 10,000 years of history . Harvard Papers in Botany . 12 . 2 . 325–334, page 325 . https://web.archive.org/web/20151010145152/http://www.uv.mx/personal/megalindo/files/2010/07/GalindoTovar_325_334_V21.pdf . 10 October 2015 . live . 10.3100/1043-4534(2007)12[325:TAPALC]2.0.CO;2 . 41761865. 9998040 .
11. Book: Rajpal . Vijay Rani . Gene Pool Diversity and Crop Improvement, Volume 1 . 2016 . Springer . 978-3-319-27096-8 . 117 . 9 April 2016 . dmy-all.
12. Web site: The Domestication History of Cotton . 21 August 2017.
13. The use and domestication of Theobroma cacao during the mid-Holocene in the upper Amazon . Nature Ecology & Evolution. 2018 . 10.1038/s41559-018-0697-x . Zarrillo . Sonia . Gaikwad . Nilesh . Lanaud . Claire . Powis . Terry . Viot . Christopher . Lesur . Isabelle . Fouet . Olivier . Argout . Xavier . Guichoux . Erwan . Salin . Franck . Solorzano . Rey Loor . Bouchez . Olivier . Vignes . Hélène . Severts . Patrick . Hurtado . Julio . Yepez . Alexandra . Grivetti . Louis . Blake . Michael . Valdez . Francisco . 2 . 12 . 1879–1888 . 30374172 . 53099825.
14. Book: Kent . J.A. . Bommaraju . T.V. . Barnicki . S.D. . Handbook of Industrial Chemistry and Biotechnology . Springer International Publishing . 2017 . 978-3-319-52287-6 . August 4, 2020 . 902 . Sunflower Seed Sunflower (Helianthus annus var. marcocarpus) is a New World crop, known to have been grown in Arizona–New Mexico in 3000 BC and in the Mississippi–Missouri Basin at least since 900 BC..
15. Book: García, Jorge Luis . M.A. . The Foods and crops of the Muisca: a dietary reconstruction of the intermediate chiefdoms of Bogotá (Bacatá) and Tunja (Hunza), Colombia (M.A.) . 2012 . . 1–201 . 2016-07-08 . 2014-05-03 . https://web.archive.org/web/20140503090004/http://www.caracol.org/include/files/chase/GarciaMA.pdf . dead .
16. Book: Smith, A. F. . 1994 . The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery . University of South Carolina Press . Columbia SC, US . 978-1-57003-000-0 .
17. Web site: Babb. Robin. May 22, 2019. The 'Nativore' Chef Working to Improve Nutrition in Indigenous Communities. June 7, 2019. Civil Eats.
18. Web site: January 2, 2019. Rediscovering Native American cuisine before it gets lost. July 27, 2019. Food Management.
19. Web site: Gomez. Adrian. August 16, 2019. Red Mesa Cuisine owner aims to bring 'ancestral foods back to the table'. November 3, 2019. www.abqjournal.com. en-US.
20. Web site: Kunz. Jenna. July 31, 2019. The Chef Revitalizing Native American Cuisine. October 11, 2019. Unearth Women. en-US.