Sweet potatoes are a versatile tuber. You can bake them. You can bake them into pies. You can turn them into the third best fries. Apparently, you can make them an integral part of the Polynesian colonial islands.
The sweet potato is not native to Polynesia, it originated thousands of miles away in Central and South America. Even so, the delicious root vegetable has become a staple of the island’s cuisine. While it is known that the crop arrived in eastern Polynesia some time after human settlement in 900 AD and then spread westward to New Zealand, scientists have debated how and when it got there. Some evidence suggests that sweet potato seeds arrived in the area through natural means such as birds, wind and ocean currents. Now, new research suggests the crop’s presence was a major factor in human expansion across the Polynesian islands.
A team of archaeologists, led by University of Otago professor Ian Barber, searched for the remains of ancient kumara (or sweet potatoes as Maori call them) on New Zealand’s Te Wahipunam Island. They found what they were looking for in the Triangle Plains, an area that had once been home to Maori farms. They found sweet potato pellets in the sand and carbon dated them.
Results showed the crop may have been cultivated as early as 1290 AD, more than 100 years earlier than previously thought, around the same time settlers began colonizing the southernmost Polynesian islands. As Barber writes in a follow-up study published Wednesday in the journal ancient timesResearch results show that sweet potatoes were one of the first crops grown by colonists. In fact, the availability of sweet potatoes as a crop may have been one of the factors that initially enabled people to colonize the islands.
This vegetable is known for its cold tolerance and speed of growth. Polynesia is a vast network of more than 1,000 islands, and settlers needed hardy crops to sustain themselves as they expanded into new territories with cooler climates than the islands near the equator. Barber said in the release that Polynesians may have been excited by knowing they had such a rich food source.
“The resilience of the American sweet potato, a legacy of continental evolution, may have helped inspire early settlers to cross cooler waters to the southern Polynesian islands, where kumara would have fared better,” he said.
Barber’s research could have some larger implications. According to the International Potato Center, more than 105 million tons of potato crops are produced globally each year, making it the fifth largest crop in the world. However, climate change may affect production, as areas producing large quantities of sweet potatoes are likely to warm dramatically by 2070. If that happens, you’ll know who to thank for saving your favorite Thanksgiving side dish.
