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New World crops

Crops native to the New World

Montage of New World domesticated plants. Clockwise from top left: 1. Maize (''Zea mays'') 2. Tomato (''Solanum lycopersicum'') 3. Potato (''Solanum tuberosum'') 4. Vanilla (''Vanilla planifolia'') 5. Pará rubber tree (''Hevea brasiliensis'') 6. Cacao (''Theobroma cacao'') 7. Tobacco (''Nicotiana rustica'')

New World crops are those crops, food and otherwise, that are native to the New World (mostly the Americas) and were not found in the Old World before 1492 AD. Many of these crops are now grown around the world and have often become an integral part of the cuisine of various cultures in the Old World. Notable among them are the "Three Sisters": maize, winter squash, and climbing beans.

List of crops

Grains	Pseudograins	Fruit	Spices	Seed crops	Beans	Root	Underground stems (tubers, rhizomes, bulbs etc)	Leaf	Fluid	Wood	Fiber
little barley, maize, maygrass, wild rice
amaranth, chia, knotweed, goosefoot, quinoa, sunflower, sumpweed (extinct as a crop)
açaí, acerola, avocado, American blueberry, cashew apple, chayote, cherimoya, American cranberry, chili pepper, curuba, custard apple, Virginia strawberry, feijoa, fox grape, Muscadine grape, guava, huckleberry, jabuticaba, jerivá, jurubeba, macaúba, naranjilla, papaya, pawpaw, passionfruit, peppers, American persimmon, pineapple, pitanga, pitaya, prickly pear, soursop, squashes and pumpkins, sugar-apple, white sapote, black sapote, yellow sapote, babaco, achacha, tamarillo, tomato, tomatillo, tucum
Nuts: American chestnut, Araucaria, black walnut, Brazil nut, cashew, hickory, pecan, shagbark hickory, vanilla, Chilean hazelnut, ice cream bean, peanut
allspice
achiote, guaraná, cocoa bean
common bean, lima bean, peanut, scarlet runner bean, tepary bean
arracacha, jicama, canna, cassava, leren, sweet potato, yacón
arrowroot, sunroot, camas bulb, hopniss, mashua, oca, potato, ulluco
agave, coca, tobacco, yerba mate, yucca, Yaupon Holly
balsam of Peru, chicle, maple syrup, rubber
logwood
some cotton species

Timeline of cultivation

The new world developed agriculture by at least 8000 BC.

--

-- The following table shows when each New World crop was first domesticated.

Date	Crops	Location
last=Smith	first=Bruce D.	title=Documenting plant domestication: The consilience of biological and archaeological approaches	journal=Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America	date=February 2001	volume=98	issue=4	pages=1324–1326	doi=10.1073/pnas.98.4.1324	pmid=11171946	pmc=33375	bibcode=2001PNAS...98.1324S	doi-access=free}}	Squash	Oaxaca, Mexico
title=A single domestication for potato based on multilocus amplified fragment length polymorphism genotyping	last=Spooner	first=DM	journal=PNAS	volume=102	issue=41	doi=10.1073/pnas.0507400102	pmc=1253605	pages=14694–99	pmid=16203994	year=2005	display-authors=etal	bibcode=2005PNAS..10214694S	doi-access=free}}	Potato	Peruvian and Bolivian Andes
6000–4000 BCE	Peppers	Bolivia
last=Ranere	first=Anthony J.	author2=Dolores R. Piper	author3=Irene Holst	author4=Ruth Dickau	author5=José Iriarte	title=The cultural and chronological context of early Holocene maize and squash domestication in the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico	journal=Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America	date=January 23, 2009	volume=106	issue=13	pages=5014–5018	doi=10.1073/pnas.0812590106	pmid=19307573	pmc=2664064	bibcode=2009PNAS..106.5014R	doi-access=free}}	Maize	Guerrero, Mexico
5500 BCE	Peanut	South America
5000 BCE	Avocado	Mexico
c. 4200 BCE	Sea-island cotton	Peru
4000 BCE	Common bean	Central America
3400 BCE	Mexican cotton	Tehuacan Valley, Mexico
3300 BCE	Cocoa	Ecuador
3000 BCE	last1=Kent	first1=J.A.	last2=Bommaraju	first2=T.V.	last3=Barnicki	first3=S.D.	title=Handbook of Industrial Chemistry and Biotechnology	publisher=Springer International Publishing	year=2017	isbn=978-3-319-52287-6	url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Jx8vDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA902	access-date=August 4, 2020	page=902	quote=Sunflower Seed Sunflower (Helianthus annus var. marcocarpus) is a New World crop, known to have been grown in Arizona–New Mexico in 3000 BC and in the Mississippi–Missouri Basin at least since 900 BC.}} other beans	Arizona–New Mexico
1500 BCE	Sweet potato	Altiplano Cundiboyacense, Colombia
author=Smith, A. F.	year=1994	title=The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery	publisher=University of South Carolina Press	location=Columbia SC, US	isbn=978-1-57003-000-0	url=https://archive.org/details/tomatoinamericae00smit_0}}	Tomato	Mexico

Dissemination to the Old World

The transfer of people, crops, precious metals, and diseases from the Old World to the New World and vice versa is called the Columbian Exchange.

Food historian Lois Ellen Frank calls potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, chili, cacao, and vanilla the "magic eight" ingredients that were found and used only in the Americas before 1492 and were taken via the Columbian Exchange back to the Old World, dramatically transforming the cuisine there. According to Frank,

References

Diamond, Jared. (1999). "Guns, Germs and Steel". W. W. Norton & Company.
Smith, A.F.. (1994). "The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery". University of South Carolina Press.
"Plant Domestication – Table of Dates and Places". About.com.
(2009). "Starch grain and phytolith evidence for early ninth millennium B.P. maize from the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico". PNAS.
Smith, Bruce D.. (February 2001). "Documenting plant domestication: The consilience of biological and archaeological approaches". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Spooner, DM. (2005). "A single domestication for potato based on multilocus amplified fragment length polymorphism genotyping". [[Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Perry, Linda. (July 17, 2007). "Precolumbian use of chili peppers in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Ranere, Anthony J.. (January 23, 2009). "The cultural and chronological context of early Holocene maize and squash domestication in the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
(June 29, 2007). "Earliest-Known Evidence Of Peanut, Cotton And Squash Farming Found". Science Daily.
(2007). "The avocado (''Persea americana'', Lauraceae) crop in Mesoamerica: 10,000 years of history". Harvard Papers in Botany.
(2016). "Gene Pool Diversity and Crop Improvement, Volume 1". Springer.
"The Domestication History of Cotton".
(2018). "The use and domestication of Theobroma cacao during the mid-Holocene in the upper Amazon". Nature Ecology & Evolution.
(2017). "Handbook of Industrial Chemistry and Biotechnology". Springer International Publishing.
García, Jorge Luis. (2012). "The Foods and crops of the Muisca: a dietary reconstruction of the intermediate chiefdoms of Bogotá (Bacatá) and Tunja (Hunza), Colombia (M.A.)". [[University of Central Florida]].
Smith, A. F.. (1994). "The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery". University of South Carolina Press.
Babb, Robin. (May 22, 2019). "The 'Nativore' Chef Working to Improve Nutrition in Indigenous Communities".
(January 2, 2019). "Rediscovering Native American cuisine before it gets lost".
Gomez, Adrian. (August 16, 2019). "Red Mesa Cuisine owner aims to bring 'ancestral foods back to the table'".
Kunz, Jenna. (July 31, 2019). "The Chef Revitalizing Native American Cuisine".

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