Can Cucurbita pepo gourd seeds be made edible? John P. Hart Research and Collections Division, New York State Museum, 3140 Cultural Education Center, Albany, NY 12230, USA Received 22 February 2004; received in revised form 6 April 2004 Abstract The earliest pre-maize indigenous crop in eastern North America are gourds of the species Cucurbita pepo; C. pepo gourd remains are found on mid-Holocene archaeological sites throughout the East. The C. pepo gourds of modern, natural populations produce high levels of extremely bitter cucurbitacins, chemicals which make both the flesh and the seeds inedible. It is assumed that the fruits and seed coats of the ancient C. pepo gourds were equally bitter and inedible. The major question regarding C. pepo gourds is how they would have been used. A series of recent experiments show that the seeds of dried C. pepo gourds can be processed to make them edible. Ó 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Cucurbita pepo; Gourd seed edibility; Eastern North America; Seed crop processing 1. Introduction Many Native American agriculturists in eastern North America relied on three primary crops at the time of European contact: maize (Zea mays ssp. mays), common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), and squash (Cucur- bita pepo ssp.). Squashes of the subspecies variety C. pepo ssp. ovifera var. ovifera are believed to have evolved from gourd populations of the subspecies variety C. pepo ssp. ovifera var. ozarkana (or another similar form), which is native to the Ozark Highlands, greater Mississippi Valley, and perhaps a large portion of the Gulf Coastal Plain [6,7,13]. Two other subspecies, C. pepo ssp. texana [14] and C. pepo ssp. fraterna [20] may also have been progenitors. Of the various indige- nous crops used extensively throughout eastern North America before evidence for maize [8,22], gourds are the earliest. Seeds and rind fragments have been found on archaeological sites as early as ca. 7100 BP in Illinois [3] and as far east and north as Maine by ca. 5600 BP [15], well outside of their current native range. Presumably, like that of their modern counterparts, the flesh of these C. pepo gourds contained high levels of extremely bitter cucurbitacins, chemicals which would have made the flesh and seed coats inedible [19]. It is not until ca. 4400 BP in Missouri [23] and ca. 2600 BP in the Northeast [10] that changes in seed size and rind thickness suggest that non-bitter edible fruits had evolved. Given the presumed inedibility of the flesh and seed coats, how the gourds would have been used, explaining their presence on mid-Holocene archaeological sites over a large area beyond their current native range, has generated much debate over the past few decades (e.g. Refs. [1,2,5,9,22]). These debates have centered on two, not mutually exclusive, hypotheses: (1) dried gourds were used for functional purposes such as fishnet floats, containers, and rattles (e.g. Refs. [2,9,17]); and/or (2) the seeds were processed to remove the seed coat bitterness and consumed (e.g. Refs. [5,19]). A series of experiments that I carried out with Daniels and Sheviak [11] demonstrated conclusively that C. pepo ssp. ovifera var. ozarkana gourds do indeed function very well as fishnet floats. Although the experi- ments were successful in demonstrating the ability of gourds to float fishnets, there still remained an issue of whether the seeds could be processed to make them edible. Cowan and Smith [5] reported that boiling C. pepo ssp. ovifera var. ozarkana seeds in water for 5e10 min made them palatable, but Asch [2] was unable to duplicate these results. My own attempt to duplicate Cowan and Smith’s results was also unsuccessful [11]. E-mail address: jph_nysm@mail.nysed.gov. Journal of Archaeological Science 31 (2004) 1631e1633 http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jas 0305-4403/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2004.04.004