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3000-Year-Old "Quinoa" Seeds Discovered in Ontario
The discovery of a cache of ancient quinoa-related seeds is upending conventional history about ancient indigenous trade and food in Ontario. During a routine archeological assessment for a Brantford housing complex in 2010, consultants were astonished to find a buried stockpile of Chenopodium berlandieri seeds that were radio-carbon dated to about 900 BC.
The domesticated goosefoot, a now-extinct species that was grown as a food crop by native farmers over 1000 km south of the Brantford area at that time, was easily recognisable by its peculiar snailshell shape - similar to its more familiar modern-day relative, quinoa.
The seeds were charred, as was the soil they were buried within, leaving researchers with several mysteries at once: how had these seeds come to be in the Great Lakes area 3000 years ago when they had not previously been found north of Kentucky in that era; were they a sign of early agriculture in the region; and why were they charred?
The last question is probably the easiest to answer. As gardeners know, it is difficult to store seeds underground, especially if they are to be preserved as food. Naturally, they would sprout and be ruined. In ancient times, grains were sometimes stored through a process called “parching” which means they were dried or toasted with fire to prevent them from sprouting. Since the soil showed evidence of being heated, the seeds might have been buried and then preserved by a fire built above. The charring might have been accidental during the attempt.
The researchers studying the cache of seeds wondered whether they might signify an earlier practice of agriculture than anyone had suspected. Local indigenous farmers cultivated corn, but the first archeological records appear much later, about 1500 years ago.
So far, there is no other evidence that goosefoot, or any other crop, was cultivated in Ontario prior to about 500 AD. Although further research could discover otherwise, no one has yet found similar caches of such ancient seeds and even the same site revealed no evidence of agricultural tools or tell-tale signs of an agrarian lifestyle.
So if the quinoa-related seeds were probably grown 1000 km south of where they were discovered, how did they get there? The researchers suggest that this discovery adds to other evidence that ancient indigenous Canadians engaged in much more sophisticated trade than has been previously assumed. It is known that tools and supplies were traded over long distances in that period. It now appears that some food grains were transported too.
One of the next steps for researchers will be to compare the ancient goosefoot seeds with their modern wild relatives in Ontario. Even if native people did not cultivate the plants 3000 years ago, it could still be possible that some of the grains fell and grew on their own to cross-breed with local wild goosefoot creating hybrids that might still exist today. Even plants that we assume are wild could be the result of more human influence than we thought.
Mysteries remain, and they only raise more questions as they reveal the possibilities of even more undiscovered history. One thing seems certain: there is a lot more that we don’t know about ancient native people and their food.
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Photo: CC BY 2.0 https://www.flickr.com/photos/wheatfields/3018416303
The original research about this discovery was published in American Antiquities in December 2018. Sources for this summary include the University of Toronto News, January 15, 2019.
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