Missouri Newspaper Cites Archaeologist’s Research Into Early Crop Cultivation

A column in the Columbia Daily Tribune in Missouri mentioned UMaine research that found the bottle gourd may be the oldest domesticated crop in the New World. UMaine archaeologist Dan Sandweiss worked several years ago with colleagues from the Smithsonian, Harvard University and New Zealand’s Massey University, to find the first groups of humans to make their way from Asia to North America may have carried seeds of the bottle gourd. The researchers found three pieces of bottle gourd in a 9,000-year-old fishing site in southern Peru.