“Once upon a time there was a pumpkin.” If you wanted to tell the story of human civilization in this hemisphere, you could begin the tale that way. In between human beings wandering through the wilderness, hunting and gathering their food, but not changing their environment, and human beings strolling through the food court at the mall, stands the pumpkin.
It wouldn’t be a short story, since it begins long ago in Mexico and Ecuador and ends on your front porch on Halloween. Archeologists have found bits of squash in Mexico and Ecuador that are physically different from their wild counterparts and similar to later, domesticated squashes. Those bits are about 10,000 years old and are older than the oldest domesticated maize (or corn) by about 4,000 years. For a long time maize was thought to be the first domesticated plant in the Western Hemisphere; but for now, that honor goes to the squash.
OK, I know, first I said pumpkin, now I’m saying squash. If you are a gardener, you may already know that pumpkins and squashes are more closely related than they might seem just by looking at them. The species name is Cucurbita pepo. Human tinkering over, well, 10,000 years, has produced C. pepo varieties we call acorn squash, zucchini, pumpkin, and more. They are all the same plant species. Yet all are a different taste sensation.
Gardeners who save their seeds to plant next year sometimes learn the differences between varieties of C. pepo the hard way. Plant pumpkins and zucchinis together in the same garden, and the fruits that grow next year will look nothing like either parent. (This year’s fruits will be true, though.) With such incredible diversity in the family tree, those fruits can turn out pretty weird looking. They might even revert back to something close to the wild form: a small, striped gourd.
But the pumpkin story isn’t one that took place only far, far away. One early chapter took place nearby in Maine. A tiny bit of squash was also found there at an archaeological site known as Sharrow. The crazy thing is that that bit of squash was dated to 6,300 years ago. While the bit was too little a bit to tell for sure, the archeologist who excavated the site, Jim Petersen, chairman of the archeology department of the University of Vermont, thinks it was of the species C. pepo.
“It is almost impossible they were native to Maine,” says Petersen. “The closest known possibly wild North American finds were found in Illinois/Missouri.”
Somehow that squash got to Maine through trade – whether from Missouri or from Mexico, one can only guess. The discovery shows that humans have been manipulating plants for a long time.
“The antiquity of this in North America is rather stunning,” says Peterson. “The Sharrow squash is one of the half-dozen oldest such finds in North America, but in a setting much cooler than the others.”
The cool climate of Maine turned out to be suitable enough for those squashes soon to be known as pumpkins. The Dartmouth Organic Farm in Hanover, New Hampshire, grows a variety of pumpkin known as Longhouse, Long Pie, or sometimes Indian pumpkin as part of their “Three Sisters” demonstration plot. The Native Americans’ “Three Sisters” were corn, beans, and squash – the agricultural underpinnings of their nutrition and culture.
Scott Stokoe, Farm Manager, can’t confirm the background of the Longhouse, but Internet rumor says it is a Native American heirloom variety from Maine, grown in the region by European settlers as well, and that it came to the farm by way of Vermont. It’s a long, skinny pumpkin, tasty in pies, but too narrow for Jack-o-lanterns.
“One of its strengths is a relatively hard outer skin, which greatly slows the decay of the fruit,” Stokoe says. “By not immediately rotting or sprouting, these plants allowed a surplus to be grown, gathered, and stored for future use. But these good-storing fruits were small, solid fruits, with little air space inside of them, just like the fruits we call winter squash.”
It was only in a more recent chapter of this story of pumpkins and humans that the American native pumpkin took on a role formerly served by the turnip in the ancient Celtic fall rituals that grew into Halloween, brought to this country by Irish immigrants.
Of the pumpkin, Stokoe says, “It is a fascinating reminder of our intimate connection to the world of plants, not just for nutrition, but for the celebration of important human events. It is also a testament to the adaptability of both humans and plants.”