Washington – Inhabitants of the New World had chile peppers and the main ingredient for taco chips 6,100 years ago, according to new research that examined the bowl-scrapings of people sprinkled throughout Central America and the Amazon basin.
Questions on the research agenda – and this is not a joke – include: Did they have salsa? And when did they get beer? The findings, described today in a report in the journal Science, make chile pepper the oldest spice in use in the Americas and one of the oldest in the world.
The researchers believe further study may show that the fiery pod was used 1,000 years earlier than their current oldest specimen, as it shows evidence of having been domesticated, a process that would have taken time. If so, that would put chile pepper in the same league (although probably not the same millennium) as hoarier spices such as coriander, capers and fenugreek.
Chile pepper, however, makes up for its junior status with rapid spread and wild popularity. Within decades of European contact, the New World plant was carried across Europe and into Africa and Asia, adopted widely, and further altered through selective breeding.
Today, chile pepper is an essential cooking ingredient in places as different as Hungary (where paprika is a national symbol), Ethiopia (where the signature spice berbere is a mixture of chili powder and a half-dozen other substances), and China (where entire cuisines are built around its heat).
In all seven New World sites where chile pepper residues were found, the researchers also detected remnants of corn. That suggests the domestication of the two foods – still intimately paired in Latin American cuisine – may have gone hand-in-hand.
As for the beer, David John Goldstein, an anthropologist at Northeastern Illinois University, in Chicago, said the New World’s oldest dedicated brewery is at a 2,600-year-old site in southern Peru.
There, people from the Wari empire made a drink called chicha from the sugary seeds of a local tree and drank it for ceremonial purposes.
Goldstein, who has brewed his own, says it has “a sort of dirty-sock taste, deep, very sour, acrid.” But the alcohol works, and he is sure some version of it was made much earlier and in many other places.
