Earliest Sign Of American Agriculture - Arizona - Brief Article

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), June, 1999

The earliest sign of agriculture in North America has been found in an Arizona cave. A kernel of domesticated corn or maize, Zea mays, dated at 3,690 years old, was excavated from McEuen Cave in the Gila Mountains some 60 miles northeast of Tucson, Ariz., by M. Steven Shackley, a research archaeologist at the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, and Bruce B. Huckell and Lisa Huckell, research archaeologists at the Maxwell Museum, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that hunters and gatherers in what is now the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico turned to farming far earlier than had been thought, perhaps as much as 2,500 years ago, Shackley indicates. "With this new evidence, we can make the case that maize spread rapidly throughout hunting and gathering groups almost as soon as it was introduced into the Southwest." Until now, "people have been dismissing these early dates as anomalous. But we're getting too many of them to ignore."

Dates for maize from the northern end of Mexico's Sierra Madre Mountains are of similar age to those found in the lowlands north of the border. "This means there was fairly rapid communication between all these groups. These recent discoveries at McEuen Cave and early settled agricultural village sites in the Tucson Basin have completely changed our conception of social evolution in this region. By 1000 B.C., settled farming village communities already were established in southern and perhaps northern Arizona, inhabited by a people relying on maize agriculture rather than hunting and gathering."