 Hello, and welcome to Ask an Archaeologist. I'm Nico Tripsovich, the host of today's show. Ask an Archaeologist is a series of live streamed interviews co-hosted by the Archaeological Research Facility and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. In this series, UC Berkeley archaeologists and others who work with archaeological materials discuss their research and answer audience questions. For those of you joining us live today, you can post your questions on the live chat box that you can see adjacent to the YouTube video feed. Today we are delighted to be speaking with Dr. Christine Hastorf, as well as being the Director of the Archaeological Research Facility. Christine Hastorf is a professor in the Anthropology Department and a curator at the Hearst Museum, and she runs the McCown Archaeobotany Laboratory. So welcome, Christine. Thank you. So we would love to hear about chili peppers and you're working something out of it. Can I start now? Yes, please share your slides. Okay, let me see. It says, sorry. It says I'm disabled to do that. Can you give me a deep? I think you have to let me do that. Okay, I think try again now. All right, that sounds good. And then, so do you see it? Dear, if you start the slideshow. There we go. How about that? Are we looking at now? Yes, perfect. Okay, great. All right, so I'm going to, it's really a pleasure to come to Ask an Archaeologist, which I think is a terrific project for us staying at home this summer, not going in the field. And I chose this topic out of my Andean Archaeobotanical research, specifically because, and it's part of prescient in a way, it was because it's about colonialism and about the impacts that radical political change can actually have, even on something as seemingly distant as the taxa, that are the plants that people grow and eat. So this is an archeological and archeobotanical sort of history I'm going to go through that gives you some background data on how we did the research that we did. And you'll see that you see the people here who are part of the team, Catherine Chu, my former graduate student, Duccio Bonavilla and Tom Dilaje. Duccio passed away, but he's a Proveian archeologist and Tom Dilaje was in charge of one of the main parts of the excavations that I'm presenting. So I, this is what our conclusion was from these data that we did. So I hope you enjoy it. So the background that I have to tell you is about the major species of our beloved chili peppers, which most of us love to eat and some chili heads love to talk about and grow and make new varieties and like to melt down when they eat really high scoville varieties. But we realized as archeologists that we had to try and separate these because most people just said, oh, it's chili pepper if they find it in an archeological site, but we realized that there's these five species up there. You see chinens, frutescens, annum, bacchotum and pubescence. You see those names across the top. And basically they all came from one ancestral pool as you can see from this lovely publication of Espa quite some time ago, but with genetics since that time, we now realize a bit more about these and we realize where their heartlands were. The original species, the progenitor, comes out of the highlands of Bolivia, but it was spread across the sort of Mesoamerican, South American landscape by birds and animals long before people came to these continents. And they sort of had these sort of rough locations here as you see on this map just to get oriented. So someone who works in the Andes, you can imagine the taxa that we should be finding or could be finding or the four that are in South America. And if we had an, well, that would mean that it was literally, it was traded down and grown down into South America. So we're going to be focusing on these taxa. First, we have to get that oriented to identify them. And here you get a good sense. We did a literature search a few years ago on this project and find that there's quite a bit of early chili pepper evidence and all those little red dots you see, and I'm not going to spend time on it, show archeological examples of chili pepper. So clearly people brought it into their homes. And one question is when did they do that and when did these species move around? So I wanted to sort of start the archeological discussion because of our linking argument. So intimately here at Berkeley with the Hearst Museum and to show you just three vessels that we found in the collections that clearly, hopefully you'll think it's clear too, that clearly illustrate chili peppers meaning people love them. They were important, they were honored, clearly grown and clearly eaten. These are kind of rough cartoon-like shapes. I mean, we can't use these to try and identify species, but I think everybody feels quite comfortable that that's what we're seeing here. So that sort of sets the stage. Anatomy of archeobotany is our method. And this is a good example of it. We took modern seeds, we collect a lot of modern seeds from all over. Many, many types. You can see 44 different growth, growth sort of plant species from all the different five taxa. We had to measure all of them. And we decided to do exploratory data analysis and measure many attributes from all of these species. So that took quite a while. That took almost a year in the lab working away at that measuring and measuring and measuring. And then bringing that together and out of analyzing that, we found eight attributes that we could use to identify species, which in a way was quite exciting. And these are just the seeds because those are the things that we find archeologically most often. And here are the eight attributes we use. Two are qualitative and six are more measurable. Now I'm not gonna dwell on this, but I just want you to be aware of how we got to identify species in the archeological record. It's not just it's a chili pepper, we wanted to say what it was. So here's kind of a nice overview that Katie Chu, my now colleague, former student created to sort of help you see seed shape. And you can see the modern ones in the middle. Those are real seeds that we measured and looked at. But just by looking at them, you get a sense of their difference in shape, which is wonderful. And you can see on the top are sort of a heuristic cartoon drawing of them. And you can see why we call some D-shaped and we have circular with fish mouth, which is a little bit unusual. I know it's kind of a funny term. And then there's some archeological examples. And hopefully even with your eyes, you can get a sense of the difference in shape, although it's a little bit tougher. And oddly enough, the collections we were dealing with, we could not find an archeological annual. And then now you know one thing we've learned. And that is that those annuals, at least in this from this collection that we're looking at on the coast of Peru, annual did not make it down there during this time period. And as far as we can tell from our research, it really didn't make it down there until the Spanish came down with it. They'd already fallen in love with chili peppers. So they brought it along with them, not knowing they were gonna find much nicer ones and more diverse ones when they get to South America. That's what this archeological row at the bottom is showing you. Can I ask is, does the anum then correspond with Mexican chilies that we know like? A Mesoamerican. It was probably domesticated as far as until I'm working on a project now with a Mexican botanist on chili peppers expressly, archeological and ethnographic. She's done vast amounts of ethnographic work. And as far as we can tell from our research, and again, we're working on the publication, is that it's kind of from that area between Veracruz and Oaxaca, that's probably where it's locus of domestication is clearly spread north and south and became the dominant tax on in what we call Mexico or Mesoamerica. There's Habanero, there's all these different chilies in Mexico today. Most of them are in, they also, you also get Chinens, traditionally before the global things while moving around post-colonially. I mean, you might be able to find these other ones there too, but they would be brought in in the historic times. These are all, these are prehistoric samples we're looking at here. Okay, so let me just quickly run through this because this is maybe too much botany, but I just wanted to share the kinds of things that we have to do in a laboratory to get to talk about people. And here you see texta or the surface of the seed. We have to take scanning electron microscope pictures and while I'm not gonna talk about the details, hopefully you can still see on the far right the more detailed images that they're slightly different coverings. We also worked on beak prominence and angle and that drawing in the upper right shows you the kinds of measurements that were made on these, all these species, all the modern samples and then the archeological ones. We also did sphericity and we did that by doing two measurements and doing an algorithm of that and the same maximum length and perpendicular width. And we found over the years from the literature, most people didn't do all of these by far, they tended just to do maximum length and it's clear that that is not enough and that's kind of part of the problem is the previous documentations or suggestions of species were probably problematic. We also found that the attachments guard, this is how the seed attaches to the pod and you see that when you open up your bell peppers, you open it up and you find the attachment and there's all the seeds that are kind of clustered around together. Well, that's when those seeds are ripped off, they leave a scar as we call it. So this is a nice up close picture of it and you can see how up close we did measure both length and width of the, basically the mouth, the opening of the scar and you can see it in the lower picture, it's nicely labeled what we were trying to measure. In addition, we also measured the test thickness which is again that skin, the surface of the seed that sometimes in some taxa like in peas, green peas, you engage with the surface in that setting and the test is what we call it and the measurement on the top, that illustrates how we did the measurements on the end of the seeds, the curves of the seeds and also in the middle and you can see from the five species down here that there are some distinct differences. The difference, especially in the lower right, the pubescence, the capsicum pubescence, radically different from the side to the middle. So that's very helpful, those are helpful measurements. So we did all of those and ran them all and again, generated this and also we learned, you can see how Bacotum, the yellow one off to the right separates out much more than the others and the others as you probably could remember from that map are more closely. Anom is the one to the north, the chanens and frutescens, there's even an issue that they might be related and they're more sort of that Caribbean, Northern, South America and pubescence also is more unique and it's the highland or the higher elevation taxa whereas Bacotum today, and I'm sort of giving you a geographical feeling of it today, Bacotum is the one that we associate with the coast of Peru and that sort of southern cone of South America and you can see how there's some overlap, there's no doubt, but that there's also some real difference especially for the two Andean ones, the pubescence and the Bacotum that you see on the north, on the upside and the right. So all of that was put together, all these different eight attributes were put together almost like a Artemis question and you can ask a question, what do you have? Do you have this or that? What's the seed shape? What's the beak angle? What's the text, et cetera? And that allows you to separate these different species out. So that's our background information. So we, after that, we then turn to the archeological record and it all was instigated by Tom Dileja and Duccio Bonavia, two of the authors that I mentioned because they were digging, redigging again at the site Waka Prieta that you see on this map, the arrow on the uppermost side, the northernmost part of Peru and Paragones. They're sort of, it's a massive early complex, a huge shell midden like in California, but really, like the Emeryville one really big and early and people had dug there, Julius Burn, Junis Burn had dug there back in the 40s and they returned and did some more detailed excavations on the mound and off the mound. So that's how we started with a long-term sequence of evidence and then after that, because it was so fascinating what we saw there, we asked the gray herbarium at Harvard to send us any seeds. We knew that Margaret Toll had archeological seeds from the coast as well and we collected material from the other two sites that you see there. So just starting with the Waka Prieta material, you can see here are just these four tacks, again, not anum, the four tacks are presented here and the most amazing thing that you can see here from this graph is that on the earliest phase, we have all four tacks turning up at different frequencies, right? And then through time, again, you see it, we start with sort of seven to 6,000 BCE in the first phase that we had no seeds that he sent us from phase three and then phase four from 5,000 to 4,000 BC. So that's 6,000 years ago. You can see this, all four tacks are there, but Bacotum is dominating, the blue is becoming dominant and then by 4,000 BCE, I know they overlap ages, these are carbon-14 date problems, but this is the later one in time, phase five. It was pretty much all Bacotum, the specimens he sent us and the numbers are up there in the upper right. So this was quite exciting and surprising for us at first. Now, we know that Bacotum is the common taxa today on the coast and this is a coastal site. So this four, 6,000 years ago, they were already focusing on this Bacotum, but all of them were being traded in or being grown or being experimented with on the coast early on, but shows the inventiveness and also the exchange, the amount of communication across South America that was going on in the earliest of times. Yeah, so let me take a minute to remind our viewers that they're welcome to post questions in the chat box adjacent to the YouTube video. And if you don't mind, I'd like to ask a question. So do these four correspond with Ahi and Rakoto and some others perhaps? And also the degree of spiciness, is there a difference in between? Yeah, they each are different. Yeah, you know, you know, Chenan's, it's quite spicy. I mean, they all have a spicy aspect to them. The only bland chili pepper really is an annual. You know, the bell pepper world is all out of annals. So when you're eating a tasteless pepper, that's an annual. I see. So, and then those five that you mentioned at the outset, that's the, those are the root of all the capsicum peppers that we know today. Correct, yeah, that spread around the globe. So when you find capsicum peppers in Africa, cuisine, which you do, or in Chinese cuisine, which you definitely do, they have come from one of the five sources, but they tended to travel out of Brazil. Those that made it to China and those that made it to Africa were, well, the African ones went early because they went on the slave commute, if you will, back and forth. So they did get to Africa quite early and they were taken up early and they got to China quite early from the Brazilian coast, again, trading of the spice, the original spice trade that everybody was after. I mean, when Columbus came to the, to the Americas, land in the Americas, he was trying to get to Asia to get spices. So they got these spices. They got the chili peppers and they took them the Europeans didn't like chili and what didn't catch on then, but it went to these other, they were trading elsewhere too. So the Portuguese were trading between sort of Indonesia and Brazil. So yeah, the taxa you see around the globe come from these five, the five taxa. Okay, so here we are, we're back, we've looked at these times here, if we think how fantastic that so early on, the coastal people of Peru focused on this one species, the pecatum and it's called punca today. A lot of people use the word on the coast, punca if you've had that. So it's a lovely rich flavor, but they all were there. So we interpreted this to be that the different species we're all experimented with and brought in probably as gifts, traded in and carried across the Andes from all over South America to the coast and people grew it perhaps, they might have just received them and ate them, but they had them, but that they were focusing in probably on growing the pecatum, for 6,000 years now, right? And so let's, here's the pecatum up close and we have this very prominent beak that you can see next to the attachment scar. The attachment scar is there on the right in that photograph. And again, it's called on the coast today, ahi punca, which some of you may know if you've eaten Peruvian, lovely coastal Peruvian food. So as I said, because we had that really interesting data out of the Waka Prieta material, we said, let's look at it through time, let's look at it later in time, let's see what's going on. And so we recovered, we wrote, I knew that Margaret Toll's collection because I'd studied it when I was in graduate school, I'd gone back to Harvard and looked at her collection because people back in the last century would send her their botanical material from the coast that wasn't systematically collected, but they would send her stuff and she wrote up beautiful identifications and also kept them meticulously. So we received 38 seeds from all the specimens, they were really helpful back at the museum at the herbaria. There's several herbaria, they've been shifted to the herbarium from the peabody, which is where they used to be. And so we got 36 seeds that were identifiable and we need the whole seed. You're probably wondering, what if I just have a fragment? Well, we can't get all the measurements, we can get some, but not all. So we identified 26 of these 38 tubicottons. So again, continuing on through time, this seed was important. So this is the crunch of the data that I really wanted to present and share with you today. And that is you have through time, these different time periods, we have waka prieta on the left or the early material kind of put together phase four, just the later phases, when bucatum was really becoming dominant and you can see it's range. And again, this we focused in on area, sort of that's the size of the seed because that's usually what happens with domestication is seeds get bigger. And as you look across the first four on the left, from waka prieta four, waka prieta five, estanquina, which is in the Nazca area, the Nazca time period, you have the dates down there and that's the third one. And then pachacama, which is late, which is the Inca, was a major Inca site and then into the Spanish colonial period. You can see that the bucatum seed sites still keeping its topography, but it's getting a lot bigger. And those are statistically significant changes. So if you forget the far one on the right and you just look at over the prehistoric times, the coastal people up and down the coast, I mean, obviously we can always use more data, but up and down the coast, we're selecting for larger seeded fruits. And then when we plotted the modern next to that, we were flabbergasted, what is going on? Why is the modern essentially almost completely different than the pachacama or the last, the Inca, the apogee of the Andean period, the time when they're all under one imperial dominant state or empire. Some people use that term. So this was sort of radical and we thought about it and we sort of ended up saying that this was, we think this is because, how come it shifted back so much on the coast to Peru? And these modern species are from up and down the coast. And you have the numbers there and by the dots, we had a reasonable amount for each group. We decided, our conclusion was that we think it is an impact of colonialism since this time that with the heavy impact of Spanish arrival on the coast and disrupting farming strategies on the coast, people were still farming. There was new plantations or encomiendas and people were being brought in as overseers and farming was done, farming was changed. They brought in cotton and rice or they use more cotton and brought in new species of cotton and European wheats and barleys and faba beans and other crops were brought in and people were not planting the way they used to plant anymore. And probably this beloved buccatum wasn't getting the selective engagement that they used to get. And so this, we interpret this as even in something as small and subtle as the chili peppers from the coast that the colonialism had an impact on them. Amazing. Oh, we just got a question, perhaps I could ask you here. Are there other disruptions in the subsistence documented at the time of colonialism? Lots of big questions. Of course, everywhere. Of course, when there is colonial, when colonialism is a success from the conquerors or the colonists side, they take over land. They often take over the best land. They harness the local labor to do different things. They sometimes continue to use the same agricultural system like terracing in the highlands or irrigation systems on the coast, which is what is required because it's so terribly dry there. These, all these would be irrigated, of course, these fields, but they clearly shift, make major shifts, meaning what was your field? If you were a farmer, even part of an empire, the Chimura Empire on the North Coast, let's say, in Peru, you might be farming for the emperor or the empire for the Inca, but you're also farming for yourself. You're gonna have your own lands and your own fields and you'll be sharing your seeds amongst your families. Once there's a disruption, and let's say you're ripped away from your land and you move somewhere else or your community's disrupted, your network, your family network is disrupted, you're not gonna have access to the same seeds and the same time to plant those seeds. So there hasn't been a lot of overt study of sort of Inca time to colonial time in terms of production, but we do know from the documents and we know from the settlement pattern that people were on the coast, especially were really removed and ripped away and the agricultural systems were reformatted. Their land was no longer their own. High, strong impact on the coast. Yeah. Are there any ethnographic? Sorry. Yeah, do you wanna present your conclusion and then I can ask a few more questions? Sure, yes. I mean, they're just what I've talked about already. I just like to summarize. So we were, these are the exciting things. We can identify the different species by their seeds, by their attributes. We had really wonderful early capsicum at the Waka Prieta site. And it's, and I think the evidence is quite strong that over time, the people of that region, that Northern coast approved, developed a really strong taste for baccalaureate. I mean, all of those chili peppers could grow on the coast. So the question still is, why did baccalaureate become so important? And so we think it's probably taste and maybe it does produce more there. And again, that study of planting them all and watching their rates of harvesting, their amounts hasn't been done yet. But we think that it was, probably they were very productive, but also that they liked the taste of the baccalaureate and that they selected and they nurtured it and they allowed, the seeds to grow is probably well as the plants to grow and to have more fruits too, right? Because you want more yield from your produce. And then of course, the shock of comparing it to what we have on the modern, that's what was so stunning for us, was this loss of this intimate engagement with your part of your family, your plant remains, that you plant and harvest and feed your own family with every year. So we sort of saw that as a colonial, a colonial description in our work. I see, wonderful. So are there ethnographic examples of farmers working today to bring back heirloom varieties of pepper? I have not worked with farmers on the coast myself. I know Katie Chu has sought out farmers of baccalaureate both large and small on the coast because she works on the coast of Peru as in her own archeological work, said let's say Chippen in Hecatepeque Valley. And she has engaged with both small and large farmers and clearly farmers are producing baccalaureate now, they are, they are. But I mean, and that's still the question is so much has been lost. I mean, they'll have to be like the Timor and the Inca, several hundred years or something to bring back what was there before. Yeah, another question. How do you find these tiny seeds in an excavation? And Owen, I just wanted to mention and follow up on that is those are amazing images you had of such small seeds, were those from an SEM? Well, the black and white ones, the one on the right is an SEM, is a scanning electron microscope photo and a cellular pattern. So we use that to study the test of surfaces, the surface. The one on the right is just taken with a BX 51 in my light microscope in my laboratory. So you just have to work on getting the light right. You put the, you put the seed on the Petri dish and that helps it float near. Anyway, that's the trick. So the seeds in fact, for us aren't that tiny. You can see the scale down there, they're about four, three to four millimeters across. So that's actually a nice size. And if you're floating or dry sieving down to one millimeter or less, 0.5 millimeters is optimal, you will recover these seeds systematically if you take care. So the seeds we got were all primarily desiccated seeds and the coast is good for that. To get seeds in the highlands or say in the Amazon, they have to be charred seeds and that will be an additional impact of the charring process you'd have to add in to your analysis. So yeah, by systematically collecting these seeds or by like the Margaret Toll collections from the 30s and 40s, 20s and teens, they were quite patchy, but she did have a lot of them. The archeologists then would have run across kind of a pile of plant matter. So they would have just collected that. Whereas today we tend to systematically screen and so we get more of these small seeds. Do you think that they were perhaps focused on eating the seeds and that's why they were selecting for such large examples? Well, that is interesting. The seeds are not the carriers of the capsaicin, the spicy part of the plant that we love so much, but that is an oil that's from the placenta, which is what the seeds are attached to. So if you did pick out a very seed from a very spicy chili pepper and eat that, you probably would get some spice. You'd get a sensation, you would taste that. But I think that the peppers were probably consumed whole and we chop them up, but we tend to put the whole thing in. I mean, sometimes people de-seed them, but I don't think they did. Now again, in fact, if they did archeologically, we'd get the seeds that they de-seeded and left in their kitchen. All right, well, we're coming to the end of our time. Maybe I'll ask one more question about peppers. Following up on the Hearst exhibit on mind-altering substances, I wonder if you have any new information about the Catoche religious tradition and the use of peppers in religious rituals. In Catoche? It's interesting you mentioned that. I would love to get more systematic material out of Catoche. It hasn't been sampled in quite a while. We would love to get more highland examples, not only out of Catoche, but out of Chavin de Huantar and all these early religious centers that were probably also trading hubs because those seeds like frutescensen, chinens, probably today are grown in the Amazon, that they tend to be in Venezuela, Eastern Columbia, Ecuador, that area, whereas pubescence is the highland crop. So we would love to watch the patterning of those seeds as well. And that just means many people's excavations they have to go through and look at the archeobotany and they have to pull out the capsicum seeds. So it's gonna take a while, but I can't speak to, there's some discussion at the Mito tradition, which Catoche is part of, which I think is what the questioner asked, of chili peppers being found in those sunken harvests and the religious harvests. And so Cyril Smith, who identified them, did find fruits and seeds there. So there is some there and they were clearly used as special things, not just for food, but for making a smoke, quite a tangy smoke, because if you've ever burned some chili peppers in your kitchen, you know you're breathing and your eyes are watering and you're definitely altering your state of consciousness. So chili peppers in their own way can really impact the body. It may not be all in the mind, but it definitely impacts the body. So, and Catoche very early on has that information. So we are aware that it probably wasn't just a condiment, that it had other, probably ceremonial uses. And that could be why it's on those Nazca pots that I started out with. That's right. Wonderful. Well, thank you very much for sharing this information. It's appropriately around lunchtime. So... Maybe it makes you hungry. That's right. I'll wrap it up and... Thank you for the question. That's right. Well, I wanna thank our viewers and listeners and everyone who sent in questions. And thank you, Dr. Christine Hastor for speaking with us. I wanna invite our listeners to join us on Tuesday, June 23rd for our next speaker. It's at noon. And this talk will be titled, How Archaeologists Deal with Uncertainty, Celebrating the Ambiguity of the Archaeological Record, A Case Study from Neolithic Serbia with Professor Meritah Ruth Tringham. So also please note that there's a link to our feedback form in the description below. So if you'd like to give us feedback on our series and please click the link. So thanks again, Christine. It's a wonderful talk.