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…
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