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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE SURPRISING STORY OF HOW PEACHES BECAME AN ICON OF THE U.S.
SOUTHEAST  
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Meghan Bartels

Scientific American
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_ New research argues that after peaches were introduced by
Europeans, they spread across the eastern U.S. with the help of
Indigenous peoples who structured the ecology and the land to be
appropriate for peaches to grow and they tended the plants. _

The Spanish brought peaches to the U.S., but Indigenous peoples
spread the fruit across the eastern half of the U.S., Minh Hoang
Cong/500px/Getty Images

 

Behind every peach you bite into is the work of countless human
generations.

The fuzzy, sweet stone fruit traces back to China, where it has been
cultivated for more than 8,000 years. It wasn’t until the 1500s that
Spanish colonists carried peaches into the Americas when they first
explored the North American Southeast, where the fruit gained a
foothold in what is now Georgia. Scientists have known that much about
this symbol of summer. But how did peaches become so widespread in the
U.S.? Research published in September in Nature Communications argues
that after the fruit was introduced by Europeans, the peach spread
across much of what is now the eastern U.S. with the help of
Indigenous peoples.

“Today, Georgia is the Peach State,” says botanist RaeLynn Butler,
secretary of culture and humanities at the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and
a co-author of the new research. “That legacy stems from a long
history.” Much of that history comes from the Muscogee (Creek)
Nation and other Indigenous communities that lived in the area when
peaches first arrived in the Americas.

“A lot of choices and agency by Indigenous people played a huge
role,” says Jacob Holland-Lulewicz, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania
State University and a co-author of the new research. They “were
also responsible for structuring the ecology and the landscape to be
an appropriate place for peaches to grow, and they tended to the peach
plants.”

Holland-Lulewicz had long noted reports of peach pits found at
archaeological sites across the southeastern U.S. And a few years ago
he decided to compile these into a more detailed picture of how
peaches spread—one that could shed light on the Indigenous histories
that archaeology has typically ignored or suppressed. “I started to
think about [the fruit] as a trade good,” he says. “Maybe we could
use peaches to track, at a really high resolution, how Indigenous
communities were interacting.”

The research team gathered evidence from more than two dozen
archaeological sites and several early towns across the southeastern
U.S. where one or more peaches had been discovered. Previous research
at some of these sites had already provided a time frame for the
presence of peaches. For the sites where that age had not yet been
determined, the researchers used radiocarbon dating, either directly
on peach pits or on other nearby materials to establish when peaches
were likely present.

This work, however, showed only where peach pits had survived—not
how people used the fruit or seeds. “We can’t see what people
actually did with peaches and peach pits, so we’re making inferences
based on the archaeological record,” says Kristen Gremillion, an
archaeobotanist at the Ohio State University, who has researched peach
history in the Americas but was not involved in the new research.

Perhaps the most surprising date the study authors determined comes
from a site in inland Georgia, where Ancestral Muskogean people lived
for a few decades beginning in the early to mid-1500s. The researchers
suggest that the two peach pits found at this site may be related to
Hernando de Soto’s early expedition inland in 1540, one of a series
of journeys that bands of Spaniards made during their first century in
the Americas.

Beyond this outlier, the peach pits didn’t appear to reach inland
Georgia until decades later. The bulk of early peaches, dating to
before 1600, come from coastal Florida and Georgia. The fruit then
spread across a swath of northern Florida and southern Georgia between
1625 and 1640. By 1650, peaches had moved throughout the rest of
Georgia and eastern Alabama, plus some sites in North Carolina and
eastern Tennessee. The fruit had reached Arkansas by the 1670s, the
researchers found, and prior archaeological records show peaches
arriving in New York State before the beginning of the 18th century.

The pattern struck Holland-Lulewicz and his co-authors as both
surprising and telling. The Spanish pivoted from occasional
expeditions to putting down roots in the Southeast beginning in the
1560s, and only then did peaches appear to do the same. But throughout
the time of the great peach migration, most Europeans in North America
were still concentrated in small population centers along the coasts.
The fruit’s spread vastly outpaced Spanish colonization, suggesting
that Indigenous people, not Spanish explorers and conquistadors, did
the work.

“This spread really started when Indigenous networks and Spanish
networks were starting to be entangled with one another,”
Holland-Lulewicz says. “From there, peaches are being spread through
the rest of the Indigenous networks to communities and towns that may
have never even, still, met a Spanish person.”

Given how quickly peach pits spread and how long it takes peach trees
to bear fruit, he says, Indigenous peoples must have transferred them
along existing networks. “This land was a continent of active
sociopolitical entities and communities and nations,”
Holland-Lulewicz says. “These relationships created this entire
continental web of interaction. These were not disconnected people
living in the forest.”

From Butler’s experience as both a botanist and a member of the
Muscogee (Creek) nation, the findings are no surprise. Her ancestors
lived across what is now Alabama, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina
until the 1830s, when the U.S. Army brutally forced Indigenous nations
of the Southeast westward to Oklahoma in what is often referred to as
the Trail of Tears.

The Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s connection with peaches survived the
trauma, a testament to the importance of the crop to its members’
lives in the U.S. East. For example, the nation included the ripening
of peaches among the timekeeping milestones it saw in the natural
world, Butler says. Her hereditary tribal town, Pakan Tallahassee, was
named for peaches, and she says these ancestors would have shared the
fruit with other communities and taken care of the trees—no small
feat, she notes. “You’ve got to be determined and patient,”
Butler says.

Indigenous peoples would have been well-equipped to cultivate peaches
from experience with other tree crops such as pawpaws and chestnuts,
Holland-Lulewicz says. And Indigenous practices such as controlled
burns would have created open landscapes that favored sun-loving
plants such as peaches.

The U.S. Indian Removal Act of the 1830s uprooted Indigenous nations,
including Butler’s ancestors, who carried peach pits on the long
journey west and still tend trees in Oklahoma. Back in the East, peach
trees suddenly left untended sometimes became too overgrown to bear
much fruit. Others survived on farmsteads, where their fruit was fed
to pigs or turned into cider, says William Thomas Okie, a historian at
Kennesaw State University, who has written about peaches but was not
involved in the new research.

Despite the historical importance of peaches across the eastern U.S.,
the modern peach industry that began in the late 1800s is linked to a
separate introduction of a specific large, attractive variety from
Asia called the Chinese Cling, Okie says. But some of the
commercialized cultivars may have mixed the Chinese Cling and other
later arrivals with the peach varieties grown by Indigenous breeders
across the southeastern U.S. before their eviction, he says.

Butler hopes future research will examine different peach
varieties—particularly those her nation continues to grow in
Oklahoma—and determine whether they are genetically related to the
first fruits Indigenous groups spread across the eastern U.S.
“It’s just neat to see science in action and how it applies to
everyday life,” she says. “Everyone has enjoyed a peach at some
point in their life but maybe never thought about how it got here.”

Meghan Bartels is a science journalist based in New York City. She
joined Scientific American in 2023 and is now a senior news reporter
there. Previously, she spent more than four years as a writer and
editor at Space.com, as well as nearly a year as a science reporter at
Newsweek, where she focused on space and Earth science. Her writing
has also appeared in Audubon, Nautilus, Astronomy and Smithsonian,
among other publications. She attended Georgetown University and
earned a master’s degree in journalism at New York University’s
Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.

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