Peppers and People in Mesoamerica: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Tracing the Origin and Domestication of Chiles (Capsicum annuum var. annuum L.)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Dolores Piperno’s career has been defined by pioneering work in multidisciplinary and collaborative plant research. Following in her footsteps, this interdisciplinary team comprised of archaeologists/archaeobotanists, an ethnobotanist, and a biogeographer assembled to investigate the origins and domestication of Capsicum annuum var. annuum L. and the cultural relationship between the Capsicum genus and Mesoamerican peoples over time. Using multiple lines of evidence including (1) morphometric analyses of modern and archaeological Capsicum seeds, (2) ecological niche modeling over the past 20,000 years, and (3) diachronic geospatial distributions of registered archaeological sites in modern-day Mexico, we identified potential locations where people would have initially encountered the wild progenitor C. annuum var. glabriusculum L.—jumpstarting the complex process of domestication that led to the rise of the quintessentially Mexican chile pepper C. annuum var. annuum.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35717.0