Pre-contact Agave Domesticates: Living Legacy Plants in Arizona’s Landscape

Summary: Researchers have long recognized the importance of agaves to Mesoamerica and its cultures, the plants providing food, fiber and beverage. However, their significance to these cultures has overshadowed and distorted the plants’ role for indigenous peoples north of the U.S. - Mexico border. Pre-Columbian farmers grew no less than six and possibly as many as eight or more domesticated agaves in Arizona dating to at least A.D. 600. Because of their longevity and primarily asexual reproduction, relict agave clones have persisted in the landscape to the present, providing an opportunity to study pre-Columbian nutrition, trade, migration and agricultural practices. Additionally, the remnant clones present a rare opportunity to examine domesticates virtually unchanged since they were last cultivated within a prehistoric cultural context. DNA sequence data, in addition to plant morphology, suggests that at least three may have originated in Arizona, suggesting this state as a secondary center of domestication. These discoveries underscore the necessity of viewing landscapes and some plant species from a cultural, rather than “natural,” perspective that may help discern potential cryptic species veiled by traditional taxonomic treatments. Understanding these plants and their ecological/cultural roles requires interdisciplinary collaboration between botanists archaeologists, and Indigenous Peoples.

Speaker Bio: Wendy has lived in and loved the Sonoran Desert for 55 years. She is Herbarium Curator Emerita and Senior Research Botanist at the Desert Botanical Garden where she has worked for 50 years. She studies southwest U.S. and northern Mexico floristics, with emphasis on the Grand Canyon region. Other areas of study include Southwest US and northern Mexico rare and endemic plants, and taxonomy and systematics of Agave, Yucca, and Hesperoyucca, including the study of pre-contact agave domesticated species. She continues to study and document Southwest US cacti, was coordinator for the Cactus family treatment for Intermountain Flora and is coordinator for the Cactus Family of Arizona project by Garden research staff and research associates. As an ethnobotanist, Wendy also specializes in Sonoran Desert food plants, having published Food Plants of the Sonoran Desert published by the University of Arizona Press in 2001 and winner of the Society for Economic Botany’s Klinger Book Award. She has collected over 33,500 herbarium specimens, including thousands of high quality specimens in difficult groups like Agavaceae and Cactaceae. Wendy believes in diverse participation and collaboration, including community scientists and especially Indigenous Peoples whose voices we have neglected to hear far too long.