The first crop grown in the Americas was squash. Hunters and gatherers in what is now Oaxaca, Mexico, domesticated a species of squash roughly 10,000 years ago, making it the oldest confirmed cultivated plant in the Western Hemisphere. But squash wasn’t alone for long. Within a few thousand years, early peoples across North, Central, and South America were independently cultivating a surprising variety of plants, from gourds and chilies to the wild grass that would eventually become corn.
Squash: The 10,000-Year-Old Crop
Seeds of domesticated squash dating to about 10,000 years ago were recovered from Guilá Naquitz Cave in the highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico. This species, known today as part of the summer squash family, was cultivated by small bands of hunter-gatherers long before anything resembling a village or farm existed. From southern Mexico, squash spread northward, reaching the Tehuacán Valley by about 7,900 years ago and arriving in northeastern Mexico by 6,300 years ago.
A separate domestication event happened in eastern North America. At the Phillips Spring site in Missouri, evidence shows that a related squash lineage was being cultivated around 5,000 years ago, derived from a wild gourd ancestor that still grows in the Ozarks today. This means squash was independently domesticated at least twice on the continent.
Bottle Gourd: A Tool, Not Just Food
Alongside squash, one of the earliest plants used in the Americas was the bottle gourd, which appears in archaeological sites by 10,000 years ago. Native to Africa, bottle gourds likely drifted across the Atlantic Ocean before being adopted and cultivated by people in the New World. While the flesh is edible, early Americans valued bottle gourds primarily as lightweight, durable containers, fishnet floats, and eventually musical instruments. It was the only domesticated plant with a global distribution before European contact.
Cassava: The Amazon’s Staple
In South America, a parallel agricultural revolution was unfolding. Genetic evidence points to cassava (also called manioc or yuca) being domesticated roughly 10,000 years ago along the southern edge of the Amazon basin, derived from a wild subspecies that still grows in the region. From there it spread quickly through the humid lowlands of South and Central America, reaching sites in Panama by about 8,000 years ago. Cassava would become one of the most important calorie sources in the tropical Americas, a role it still plays today.
Maize: From Wild Grass to Global Staple
Corn, or maize, is the crop most associated with the Americas, but it wasn’t one of the very first. Its ancestor was teosinte, a scraggly wild grass with tiny, hard seed cases that looks almost nothing like a modern ear of corn. The transformation from teosinte to maize is one of the most dramatic feats of plant breeding in human history, and it happened in stages over thousands of years.
Microscopic starch grains and plant silica fragments recovered from a rock shelter in Mexico’s Balsas River Valley show that maize was present by about 8,700 years ago, in the seasonal tropical forests where teosinte naturally grows. The oldest visible corn cob fragments come from Guilá Naquitz Cave in Oaxaca, dated to around 6,250 years ago. These early specimens show that farmers were already selecting for a key trait: cobs that held onto their seeds instead of shattering and scattering them like wild grasses do. But the process was far from complete. Some of those ancient cobs had two rows of kernels, others four, suggesting the genetic changes hadn’t yet stabilized into the uniform ears we know today.
Early farmers were manipulating at least two major genetic traits: one that condensed the plant’s branching pattern into a compact ear, and another that softened the hard casing around each kernel, making the grain accessible for eating. Over the following millennia, continued selection and crossbreeding produced increasingly productive plants that spread across both continents.
Beans and Chili Peppers
Common beans were domesticated in Mexico by about 7,000 years ago, eventually forming the protein-rich partner to maize in the famous “Three Sisters” planting system (corn, beans, and squash). Peru had its own independent bean domestication. Large Lima beans appear in Peruvian archaeological sites dating to roughly 5,300 years ago, while a smaller variety was cultivated there by about 1,400 to 1,800 years ago. The tepary bean, a drought-hardy species suited to arid environments, was domesticated in Mexico around 5,000 years ago.
Chili peppers followed a similar pattern. The oldest confirmed chili pepper remains come from dry caves in the Mexican states of Puebla and Tamaulipas. Linguistic evidence pushes the timeline back further: the oldest ancestral language in the Americas that has a reconstructed word for chili pepper dates to roughly 6,500 years ago. Researchers have identified central-east Mexico, stretching from southern Puebla through northern Oaxaca to southern Veracruz, as the most likely region where chili peppers were first cultivated. Five different chili species were eventually domesticated across the Americas, but the common chili pepper originated in this Mexican heartland.
Potatoes and Cotton
High in the Andes, a different crop was taking shape. DNA analysis of hundreds of wild and cultivated potato varieties has traced the cultivated potato to a single ancestral line originating in central or southern Peru. The potato became the caloric engine of Andean civilizations, thriving at altitudes where maize struggled, and it remains one of the most important food crops on Earth.
Cotton was domesticated for fiber rather than food. Archaeological remains of cotton from the Tehuacán Valley in Mexico date to between 5,500 and 4,300 years ago, and the wild ancestor likely grew along coastal dunes of the Yucatán Peninsula. By the time Spanish explorers arrived, cotton was cultivated across Mexico and used extensively for weaving textiles and in ritual practices. Some genetic estimates suggest the domestication process could have begun as early as 11,700 years ago, though the physical archaeological evidence starts later.
Agriculture Wasn’t the Only Path
It’s worth noting that farming wasn’t the only way early Americans built complex food systems. Recent excavations in Belize uncovered a massive fish-trapping system of canals and ponds built by hunter-gatherer-fishers during the Late Archaic period, around 2000 to 1900 BCE. Radiocarbon dating of 26 samples showed the facility could have fed up to 15,000 people per year, and no pollen from domesticated crops was found nearby. These fisheries were built a thousand years before any previously known examples and were later inherited by the ancient Maya. The discovery is a reminder that agriculture was just one of several strategies early Americans used to support growing populations.
A Timeline of First Crops
- ~10,000 years ago: Squash and bottle gourd in southern Mexico; cassava along the southern Amazon
- ~8,700 years ago: Earliest evidence of maize in Mexico’s Balsas Valley
- ~7,000 years ago: Common beans in Mexico
- ~6,500 years ago: Chili peppers in central-east Mexico (linguistic evidence)
- ~6,250 years ago: Oldest visible maize cob fragments in Oaxaca
- ~5,500–4,300 years ago: Cotton in the Tehuacán Valley, Mexico
- ~5,300 years ago: Large Lima beans in Peru
- ~5,000 years ago: Squash independently domesticated in eastern North America; tepary beans in Mexico
The Americas produced an extraordinary number of the world’s most important crops. What’s striking is how many independent centers of domestication existed, from the Mexican highlands to the Amazon basin to the Andes, each driven by local people experimenting with the wild plants around them thousands of years before any contact between these regions.