Discovery of the Early Squash Seeds from Peru Tuesday, Oct 21 2008

New research favors the idea that agriculture began in the New World shortly after it first appeared in the Old World. Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University has the squash seeds to prove it.

Found in buried house floors in the northern Andean Ñanchoc Valley, the seeds were discovered near other floral remains, including peanut shells, quinoa grains, and cotton bolls, as well as stone hoes, grinding stones, plots for planting, and small-scale canals for irrigation. With accelerated mass spectrometry, Dillehay’s team dated the remains to between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, with the 10,000-year-old cultivated squash seeds being the oldest. Similarly old evidence of other species of squash has also been found in Mexico and Ecuador.

Across the world, in the Fertile Crescent, the domestication of rye, wheat, and barley between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago helped mark the transition from nomadic lifestyles to sedentary agricultural communities that would lead to more complex societies. Plant cultivation appears to have played a similarly central role in the tropical dry forest of the Ñanchoc Valley. Over several thousand years, the people settled down, planted more, managed their water supply, and built ritual mounds–steps toward the more advanced Andean cultures to come. According to Dillehay, “Not only do people domesticate plants, but the plants in some ways domesticate people.”

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Discovery of Solar Observatory at Peru Friday, Oct 10 2008

Travelers have noticed the 13 stone towers rising over Peru’s coastal desert since at least the nineteenth century. But researchers only last year discovered the structures’ purpose: they make up a sophisticated solar observatory, one of the earliest known in the Americas.

Iván Ghezzi of Peru’s National Institute of Culture and Clive Ruggles of the University of Leicester showed that the arc of the 13 Towers of Chankillo, built by a still unnamed culture, corresponds almost exactly to the rising and setting sun’s range of movement over a year. On the December 15 solstice, for example, the sun would have risen directly over the southernmost tower, when viewed from the west. Wooden lintels embedded in the towers date to about 300 B.C.

Tracking the sun’s progress would have helped Chankillo’s builders time the planting of their crops. But the towers were probably also meant to express rulers’ mystical kinship with the sun, and their ability to influence its movement. “If you were just measuring seasons, there would be no need to make such great structures,” says Ghezzi. “The idea was to transmit a political and ideological message about a ruler’s close relationship with the sun.” An enormous, circular “fortress” near the towers may have played a role in the display.

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