Numerous landraces of C. maxima with differing fruit characteristics can be found throughout South America today. However, archaeological remains are less widespread. Most are from coastal Peru, where the earliest evidence of domestication appears between 2500 and 1500 B. C. Later pre-Columbian remains have been found in. Argentina (500 B. C.) and northern Chile (A. D. 600). Early Spaniards noted that landraces of C. maxima were being grown by the Guarani indigenes of northeastern Argentina and Paraguay.
The wild progenitor of domesticated C. maxima ssp. maxima is C. maxima ssp. andreana (Naud.) Filov, a weedy native of warm temperate regions in northern Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, and possibly
Paraguay. Hybridization between cultivars and wild populations has contributed to genetic variability in ssp. andreana, producing wild fruits that vary from pear-shaped to oblong to round. Some landraces may have been selected from these introgressed populations.
South American aborigines apparently selected for large fruits of ssp. maxima with high-quality flesh and good storage capabilities. The largest South American fruits, weighing 20 to 40 kg, are found in landraces from central Chile. Fruits with a woody skin suitable for long storage were noted in Bolivia by Russian explorers in the 1920s. Warty fruits also evolved in South America, and in the twentieth century are found in Bolivia and Peru. Other native landraces yield tasty immature fruits.
Cultivation of C. maxima did not spread to northern South America, Central America, and North America until after the European invasion of the sixteenth century. Yankee sailors were supposedly responsible for introducing various cultivars, including ‘Acorn’, or French Turban’, Cocoa-Nut’, and ‘Valparaiso’, to New England early in the nineteenth century. Although all of the horticultural groups probably have their origins in South America, the spread of C. maxima throughout North America yielded some new landraces and cultivars. For example, ‘.Arikara’ and ‘Winnebago’ are landraces that were grown by aboriginal tribes in North Dakota and Nebraska, respectively, during the beginning of the twentieth century. The “banana squashes” proliferated in Mexico, and “Hubbard squashes,” like ‘Marblehead’, came to the eastern United States from the West Indies during the 1800s.
Visitors took several types of C. maxima back to Europe during the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Some, like the turban squash called ‘Zapallito del Tronco’ or Tree Squash’, came directly from South America. Most cultivars were introduced from colonial North America, but others reached Europe via Asia, Australia, and Africa, where local landraces evolved. For example, ‘Red China’ is a small turban squash that was brought to Europe from China in 1885. India also became a secondary center of culti-var diversity, particularly for the large “show pumpkin” types. Today, Indian fruits, weighing up to 130 kg, range from spherical to oblong to turban-shaped. Unusually shaped squashes with brown seeds such as Crown’, Triangle’, and ‘Queensland Blue’ are late-maturing Australian cultivars. And in. Africa, C. maxima was so widespread by the nineteenth century that some botanists mistakenly concluded that Africa was the ancestral home of this squash.
In addition to collecting cultivars from around the globe, the Europeans succeeded in producing their own new strains, particularly in nineteenth-century France. For example, Etampes’ and Gray Boulogne’ entered the commercial trade in the 1880s. Selections within the “turban squashes” at this time focused on producing smaller nonprotruding crowns.
Cucurbita ficifolia
Pre-Columbian remnants of domesticated C. ficifolia have been found only in Peru, with the earliest seeds, peduncles, and rind fragments dating between 3000 and 6000 B. C.An archaeological seed from southern Mexico that was originally identified as C. ficifolia apparently belongs to C. pepo instead (cf. Andres 1990). Assuming domestication in northern South America, it is not known when this squash reached Mexico; however, it was being cultivated there in the twelfth century.
No wild species of squash exhibits the type of relationship with C. ficifolia that is expected in the pairing of a crop with its wild progenitor. Although definitively wild populations of C. ficifolia have not been identified, reports of weedy, self-sustaining plants in Guatemala and Bolivia are intriguing and need to be explored further.
As with the other domesticates, human selection produced relatively large, fleshy, nonbitter fruits with large seeds. However, the overall lack of genetic diversity in C. ficifolia relative to the other domesticated squashes suggests that human selection pressures on the former have been limited in their duration, their intensity, their diversity, and their effects.
This cool-tolerant but short-day squash did not reach Europe until the early 1800s, coming by way of southern Asia, where the long-keeping fruits were mainly used to feed livestock, especially during lengthy sea voyages. Although some accessions of C. ficifolia have been successfully grown as far north as Norway, the general failure of this species to flower beyond the torrid zone may account in part for its lack of popularity in Europe.
World History
