Abstract
At European contact, Native American agriculturalists in both eastern North America and Middle America (Mexico and Central America) relied primarily on a group of three crops: maize, squash, and beans. The widespread geographical occurrence of this agrarian triad in historical times would seem to suggest its considerable antiquity in the New World. While archaeological investigation indicates that each of the crops was domesticated in the Americas thousands of years ago, it also indicates that times of domestication and times of diffusion were substantially different for each (Smith 2001). This study presents linguistic evidence bearing on the prehistoric chronology of one of these crops, the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.).
The common bean (hereafter bean) was domesticated in two New World regions, Mesoamerica and the Andes (Gepts 1998). The earliest date for cultivated beans in the Americas is around 4400 years BP (before present) (Kaplan and Lynch 1999:269). This date was determined through use of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) applied to an archaeological bean specimen recovered from Guitarrero Cave in Andean Peru.
AMS has produced a definitive bean chronology for at least one area of the New World. It is now decisively determined that in the northern Eastern Woodlands of North America beans became a significant part of the Amerindian diet beginning around 700 years BP (Hart and Scarry 1999, Hart et al. 2002). For various reasons, definitive bean chronologies are yet to be determined for other New World regions.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Some languages have more than one term for bean.
- 3.
Many of the dictionaries, vocabularies, and word lists from which Amerindian-language bean terms have been extracted are listed in Appendix B of Brown (1999:184–220). Some words for bean in languages of eastern North America are from Munson (1973). Hill (2001) has been a source for bean terms of some Uto-Aztecan languages. Lehmann (1920) was consulted for terms for bean in a number of languages of southern Central America.
- 4.
In order to state definitively that similar terms trace to a single protoword, it must be established that these words demonstrate regular sound correspondences.
- 5.
Conclusions reached through use of these conventions have in some instances been modified when appropriate published and unpublished accounts indicate alternative analyses.
- 6.
The subgrouping of Mayan presented in Table 1 follows that used by Brown and Wichmann (2004:129–130). In this study, all analyses, except that for Mayan and Southern Uto-Aztecan, are based on subgrouping of genetic units as given in Campbell (1997). Southern Uto-Aztecan is based on Kaufman’s (1994a) classification.
- 7.
I have detailed knowledge of regular sound correspondences that hold across languages of the Mayan family. The bean terms given in bold type and suffixed with (1) in Table 1 show expected phonological correspondences indicating that they are reflexes of a Proto-Mayan term for bean. Wichmann and Brown (n.d.) reconstruct this term as *keenaq’ and Kaufman (2003) reconstructs it as *kenaq’.
- 8.
By concluding N, that there is no evidence of a prototerm for bean, I am not implying that an ancestral language did not have a bean term, only that the assembled evidence does not attest to one. In Brown (2006a, b) I argue at considerable length that in those instances in which terms for maize and squash, respectively, pertained to an ancestral language, but in which those crops were not especially salient for its speakers, such prototerms would tend to be replaced over time and not survive in offspring languages. On the other hand, I argue that if such terms are retained by most offspring languages, this attests to the great cultural importance of these items for speakers of an ancestral language. Thus, in this study, positing a bean term for an ancestral language is to be understood as implying the considerable cultural importance of beans for its speakers, probably indicating that beans constituted for them a major dietary resource.
- 9.
- 10.
Typically this is a list of 100 items including, for example, such common things as seed, blood, and water, and such ordinary activities as eat, sleep, and hear.
- 11.
- 12.
The correlation described here is presented in Brown (2006a) as a 2 × 2 crosstabulation yielding a strong gamma score of 0.56 with statistical significance at the p < 0.05 level.
- 13.
In Brown (2006a), by adjusting glottochronological dates in this manner, the 2 × 2 crosstabulation of glottochronological dates and archaeological dates yields an exceptionally strong gamma score of 0.81 with statistical significance at the p < 0.001 level.
- 14.
Discussion of this section assumes that parent languages were spoken in geographic regions in which their offspring languages were found at the time of European contact. Of course, Native Americans of prehistoric times migrated, perhaps more than just occasionally. However, given the enormous size of regions dealt with in this study, for example, eastern North America east of the Mississippi River, and Mexico and northern Central America, it is unlikely that languages typically became relocated in geographic space to such an extent that they were no longer spoken in the same general area as their respective parent languages. An exception to this generalization may be some Uto-Aztecan languages. Early offspring languages of Proto-Uto-Aztecan may have migrated from the Mexico/northern Central America region to the American Southwest (cf., Hill 2001) or vice versa. Languages of the Algonquian family may constitute another exception.
- 15.
The Five Nations terms for bean are: Cayuga usá’heda, Seneca ′osáe′ta′, Onondaga usahé’ta, Onieda osahé:ta′, and Mohawk osahéta.
- 16.
The Tuscarora term for bean is θaehe′.
- 17.
I may be overly pessimistic with regard to the possibility of finding prehistoric bean remains in open sites of the region. In response to my pessimism, Gayle J. Fritz in a personal communication writes, “I’ve shifted over the years away from thinking that beans are very unlikely to enter the archaeological record at open sites where they have to have been charred. At later pre-contact sites in eastern North America, we frequently find charred beans, sometimes a whole lot of them. Any flotation assemblage with lots of stuff will probably include anywhere from a few to many beans. So when archaeologists begin to float lots of soil from Archaic sites in Mexico, I think there’s a good chance that the 2500–4000 year old beans that you convincingly predict were grown there will turn up.”
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Brown, C.H. (2010). Prehistoric Chronology of the Common Bean in the New World: The Linguistic Evidence. In: Staller, J., Carrasco, M. (eds) Pre-Columbian Foodways. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0471-3_11
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