Imprensa: "One hot archaelogical find"

Wed Feb 21 01:21:10 UTC 2007

Washington Post (Feb/16/2007)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/15/AR2007021502130.html

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*One Hot Archaeological Find
*Chili Peppers Spiced Up Life 6,100 Years Ago

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 16, 2007; A01

Inhabitants of the New World had chili peppers and the makings of taco chips
6,100 years ago, according to new research that examined the bowl-scrapings
of people sprinkled throughout Central America and the Amazon basin.

Upcoming questions on the research agenda -- and this is not a joke --
include: Did they have salsa? When did they get beer?

The findings described today in a 15-author report in the journal Science
make the chili pepper the oldest spice in use in the Americas, and one of
the oldest in the world.

The researchers believe further study may show that the fiery pod was used
1,000 years earlier than their current oldest specimen, as it shows evidence
of having been domesticated, a process that would have taken time. If so,
that would put chili peppers in the same league (although probably not the
same millennium) as hoarier spices such as coriander, capers and fenugreek.

The chili pepper, however, makes up for its junior status with rapid spread
and wild popularity. Within decades of European contact, the New World plant
was carried across Europe and into Africa and Asia, adopted widely, and
further altered through selective breeding.

Today, the chili pepper is an essential cooking ingredient in places as
different as Hungary (where paprika is a national symbol), Ethiopia (where
signature spice, berbere, is a mixture of chili powder and half a dozen
other substances), and China (where entire cuisines are built around its
heat).

In all seven New World sites where chili pepper residue was found, the
researchers also detected remnants of corn. That suggests the domestication
of the two foods -- still intimately paired in Latin American cuisine -- may
have gone hand in hand.

The study, led by Linda Perry of the Smithsonian Institution, does more than
illuminate one aspect of early cooking. It provides details about early
plant cultivation in South America, where agriculture emerged independent of
its "discovery" in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia.

Chili residue was found in both the Amazon basin and on the coast of
Ecuador. Because the plants don't grow in the high, arid regions where
advanced Andean cultures evolved, the domestication probably occurred in
more primitive, tropical cultures, which then traded domesticated plants
across the mountains.

"The usual idea is that the tropical lowlands were mostly on the receiving
end, that they were not areas of innovation. Now our findings are beginning
to cast doubt on that," said J. Scott Raymond, an archaeologist at the
University of Calgary and co-author of the paper. Artifacts he excavated in
western Ecuador contained chili residue.

The research also advances techniques in "archaeobiology," a discipline that
fuses archaeology and, in this case, botany. Specifically, it shows that the
study of microscopic starch granules stuck in the crevices of cooking
implements can reveal foods that weren't thought to have enough starch in
them to be traceable.

Peppers are in the botanical family Solanaceae, which includes tomatoes,
another popular New World plant. A high priority now, Perry said, is to see
if there are overlooked and still preserved starches from tomatoes in
ancient implements.

Many plants have distinctive starch granules visible when dissolved in water
and viewed under a microscope. A scientist recognized in 1913 that they
could be used to identify the presence of different species. But only
recently have researchers discovered that starch could survive for thousands
of years in the "microclimate" of tiny pits in ancient implements dug up
from warm and wet environments, where other plant material had long ago
rotted away.

"They are really tough little guys," Perry said.

She went to work in 2005 trying to identify a starch granule she saw in
material provided by Raymond, who had been excavating a 6,100-year-old site
in western Ecuador for many years. It clearly wasn't from any of the usual
sources such as yams, potatoes or cassava.

Perry recalled hearing that chilies can cause gas and diarrhea in some
people, and those are problems often blamed on undigested starches. This
seemed odd, because peppers weren't thought to have starches.

"And that is when the light bulb went on. What if they do?" she said.

She went to the Smithsonian's storehouse of plant material in Suitland, Md.,
and retrieved a sample of wild chili. It included a small fruit -- a pepper.
She rubbed it on a slide, added water and looked through the microscope. She
saw tiny starch granules.

Next, she looked at samples of modern, domesticated chili peppers. Their
granules were much larger and had a characteristic central depression. The
mystery granule looked just like them.

Ultimately, she found traces of at least three different kinds of peppers,
already domesticated, from seven sites.

It's impossible to identify with certainty the first spice ever sprinkled on
a roasting haunch or thrown into a stew pot. But Wendy L. Applequist, an
ethnobotanist at the Missouri Botanical Garden, said capers have been found
at 10,000-year-old sites in Iran and Iraq; coriander at an 8,500-year-old
site in Israel; and fenugreek in Syria's Tell Aswad, which is 9,000 years
old. Whether these were domesticated or wild is not known.

As for the beer, David John Goldstein, an anthropologist at Northeastern
Illinois University in Chicago, said the New World's oldest dedicated
brewery is at a 2,600-year-old site in southern Peru. There, people from the
Wari empire made a drink called chicha from the sugary seeds of a tree and
used it for ceremonial purposes.

Goldstein, who has brewed his own, says it has "a sort of dirty-sock taste,
deep, very sour, acrid." But the alcohol works, and he is sure some version
of it was made much earlier and in many other places.
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