Columbian Exchange Research Articles

High definition 3D models of small legume seed: a close up application to support ancient plant genomics

Abstract. Legume seeds are essential for nutrition and play crucial roles in food security, climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and sustainability. Among them, the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is the most widely cultivated and vital to the food value chain. Originating in Mesoamerica and independently domesticated there and in the Andes about 8,000 years ago, common beans have adapted to diverse environments globally following the Columbian exchange. Ancient DNA (aDNA) sequencing offers insights into the bean’s adaptation and evolution, but traditional methods struggle with detailed 3D phenotypic analysis due to the beans’ small size and the destructive nature of aDNA extraction. Expensive high-detail optical instruments are not commonly available in genetic labs. This research proposes macro-photogrammetry as a low-cost technique for creating detailed 3D digital replicas of beans. By using samples from archaeological sites in northern Peru, this method preserves phenotypic information despite the destruction of physical samples during DNA extraction. The study details the process of capturing high-detail images with specialized equipment to build a digital phenotype library, preserving the morphological features of ancient beans for further study and future comparison with modern varieties.

Disease and Expansion: A Review of Medical, Ecological and Social Consequences of the Columbian Exchange

The exploratory voyage of Christopher Columbus and his arrival in the Bahamas on October 12th, 1492 marked an innovative discovery of the New World. Since then, a series of interactions, including trade, flora, livestock, diseases, technology and ideas, have been extensively exchanged between Europe and the Americas. This massive exchange involved not only economic gains and political domination, but also profound medical, ecological and social impacts: it has transferred viruses and bacteria that carried lethal diseases from Europe to indigenous peoples who lacked immunity. Likewise, the Americas also transmitted fatal diseases through its conquistadors, which eventually resulted in numerous victims in Europe. This paper discusses several notable issues during the Columbian Exchange of diseases, including European medical settlements in the New World, the discovery of new remedies, and main diseases that spread to both the New World and the Old World. Based on the colonial context, this paper will explain the subsequent effects that ultimately changed the world. Overall, it is difficult to imagine how different the world would be without this exchange, in which diseases played an important role in contributing to European prosperity.

Dispersal, Adoption, Rejection: The Columbian Exchange and the West Pacific

AbstractThe study of historic ecological exchange is a multidisciplinary pursuit between paleoecology, history, and archaeology. This special collection and introduction explore ecological exchange between approximately 1500 and 1700 CE in the West Pacific, specifically in the Japanese and Philippine Archipelagos as well as littoral China. Rather than focusing exclusively on the introduction of exotic flora and fauna, the introduction and collection emphasize the dispersal, adoption, and—at times—rejection of imported species. In the process, the collection exhibits the array of techniques available to study past exchanges and the need for further research on this topic and region.

Cultivating Wheat in the Philippines, ca. 1600–1800 CE: Why a Grain Was Not Adopted by Local Populations

AbstractStudying why newly introduced cultivars fail to make inroads with local populations is notoriously difficult, as these “rejected” crops often leave little or no physical evidence. Taking advantage of unusually ample historical documentation, this paper studies wheat’s introduction, dispersal, and sporadic cultivation in the Philippine archipelago, with an emphasis on the period between 1640 and 1670 CE when sustained wheat cultivation began near Manila. Using documents and comparisons to other cultivars imported during the Pacific Columbian Exchange, the paper identifies several independent barriers to wheat’s cultivation, all of which aligned to ensure wheat was never widely farmed by local populations.

The Great Geographical Discoveries from the Perspective of Environmental History--A book report on The Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange, the masterpiece of the American historian Alfred W. Crosby, is honored as the founding text for researches on environmental history, in which the author Crosby explored an environmental-history perspective that was novel at the time, re-examining the historic events in the Age of the Great Geographical Discoveries including Christopher Columbus's discovery of the Americas and Europeans' colonization there, and interpreting the history by virtue of exchanges and transitions of the environment and the creatures therein. From the perspective of historical research, this ecological-history perspective represented at that time a pioneering research progress.

Silko, Kimmerer, and Plantationocene Storytelling

ABSTRACT: According to the Plantationocene narrative, human nature changed in or around the year 1610, when the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas may have caused a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide. While many environmental humanities scholars in the Global North have replaced the term "Anthropocene" with "Plantationocene" to highlight environmental inequities, they still impose a global historical narrative on many peoples who already have their own origin stories, modes of understanding history, and environmental relationships. Like the Anthropocene, the Plantationocene reinforces western narratives of a singular linear "fall" from an ecological paradise to a laborious agricultural system. The essay highlights parallels between the Plantationocene narrative and foundational western origin stories, including the fall of Adam and Eve and the descent from the Golden Age to the Iron Age in Greco-Roman mythology. Both narratives posit prehistorical Earth as a leisurely, pastoral space in which the land gave freely to humans. Both also include a fall, in which the land stops giving and humans must suddenly work and suffer in order to eat. Plantationocene scholars must center Global South environmental narratives, which seldom subscribe to a linear rendering of time, or risk recreating the universalizing Anthropocene. Indigenous writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) do not cite the Columbian Exchange as the solitary event that forever marred their nations' environmental relations. Instead, in Braiding Sweetgrass (2015) and Ceremony (1977), they posit many environmental inflection points. Rather than reading the contemporary world as "fallen," they leave room for growth and wholeness even as they hold accountable the perpetrators of Indigenous genocide and environmental destruction. Rather than splitting history in two—a leisurely "before" and a laborious "after"—they imagine fulfilling agricultural work before European contact and environmental tragedy that postdates the seventeenth century.

Silko, Kimmerer, and Plantationocene Storytelling

ABSTRACT: According to the Plantationocene narrative, human nature changed in or around the year 1610, when the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas may have caused a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide. While many environmental humanities scholars in the Global North have replaced the term "Anthropocene" with "Plantationocene" to highlight environmental inequities, they still impose a global historical narrative on many peoples who already have their own origin stories, modes of understanding history, and environmental relationships. Like the Anthropocene, the Plantationocene reinforces western narratives of a singular linear "fall" from an ecological paradise to a laborious agricultural system. The essay highlights parallels between the Plantationocene narrative and foundational western origin stories, including the fall of Adam and Eve and the descent from the Golden Age to the Iron Age in Greco-Roman mythology. Both narratives posit prehistorical Earth as a leisurely, pastoral space in which the land gave freely to humans. Both also include a fall, in which the land stops giving and humans must suddenly work and suffer in order to eat. Plantationocene scholars must center Global South environmental narratives, which seldom subscribe to a linear rendering of time, or risk recreating the universalizing Anthropocene. Indigenous writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) do not cite the Columbian Exchange as the solitary event that forever marred their nations' environmental relations. Instead, in Braiding Sweetgrass (2015) and Ceremony (1977), they posit many environmental inflection points. Rather than reading the contemporary world as "fallen," they leave room for growth and wholeness even as they hold accountable the perpetrators of Indigenous genocide and environmental destruction. Rather than splitting history in two—a leisurely "before" and a laborious "after"—they imagine fulfilling agricultural work before European contact and environmental tragedy that postdates the seventeenth century.

Fifty Years Later—The Legacy of Alfred Crosby’s “The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492”

Fifty Years Later—The Legacy of Alfred Crosby’s “The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492”

Palm Oil Diaspora: Afro-Brazilian Landscapes and Economies on Bahia's Dendê Coast

Palm Oil Diaspora: Afro-Brazilian Landscapes and Economies on Bahia's Dendê Coast

The Impact of Long–Term Orientation Traits on Pandemic Fatigue Behavior: Evidence from the Columbian Exchange

Leveraging exogenous variation in time preferences, we measure the causal effects of culturally embodied long-term orientation traits on voluntary social distancing behavior, COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and mortality outcomes in 2020 in the United States. We establish that long-term orientation traits with bio-geographical origins causally reduce measures of COVID-19 cases, deaths and hospitalization, inpatient bed utilization, and age-specific excess deaths. Mobility indicators measuring voluntary decisions to socially distance, comprising measures of visitors/visits to recreational locations, and mobility proxy measuring duration of hours away from home show that a lower prevalence of long-term orientation traits explains persistent resistance to social distancing.

Range Limits: Semiferal Animal Husbandry in Spanish Colonial Arizona

In North America, the introduction of livestock as part of the Columbian Exchange had profound social and ecological consequences for cultural environments, yet the landscape impacts of these animals have been difficult to identify, particularly in the first decades of sustained contact. Between 1701 and 1775, at a Spanish colonial mission near what is today Nogales, Arizona, O'odham groups and Spanish missionaries generated land management practices that wove together the needs of domesticated animals and existing Indigenous farming practices. This study proposes a set of indicators to identify animal husbandry practices in both the archaeological and historical record. Faunal, isotopic, and historical analyses from Mission Los Santos Ángeles de Guevavi provide evidence that cattle ages were loosely monitored and that cattle were culled at an older age than optimal for meat and grease extractive strategies compared to other domesticated species at the site. These findings suggest a low investment strategy in cattle, which may have helped Indigenous groups continue aspects of precontact agricultural and gathering practices and preserve their communities in the colonial period. These findings provide further evidence of the depth of animal husbandry practices among Indigenous groups in the Southwest.

The Battle Rages On

The Battle Rages On

Across Time, Space, and Matter

Across Time, Space, and Matter

Creole Ecologies, Feral Customs: A Coevolutionary History of Buccaneering in Hispaniola During the Seventeenth Century

As the European colonization of the Americas progressed through territorial occupation and economic exploitation, the motley Atlantic society that emerged from the Columbian Exchange also led to unprecedented social experiments. This article analyzes the consolidation of buccaneers’ society in the island of Hispaniola during the first half of the seventeenth century. Adopting the methodological tools of environmental history – with a particular emphasis on coevolutionary history and neo-materialism – it assesses how feral European-borne animal species such as feral cattle and pigs played a central role in the creation of this cosmopolitan society living at margins of western civilization. The result was a coevolutionary ecological niche built upon the pounding heart of the creole Caribbean environment of Hispaniola, one the first Spanish settlements in the Americas. After reconstructing their historical trajectory in relation to feral animal species, it also analyzes the historical causes that led to the demise of buccaneers and to the emergence of the plantation complex. This article draws from a vast array of primary sources produced by explorers from several European nations and former buccaneers as well as from scholarly publications in environmental history, Caribbean history and the history of European colonialism.

Iconography of Beans and Related Legumes Following the Columbian Exchange.

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.), maize, and squash were described by explorers as early as 1492. The illustration of common bean recognized as the first in Europe is in Fuchs’ Di Historias Stirpium, published in 1542 and a half-century after beans were observed in the Caribbean. Besides herbals and herbarium specimens, the sources of information on the introduction of New World crops are paintings and illustrations. Two early sources of images of maize and squash are the Grandes Heures d’Anne de Bretagne and the Loggia di Amore e Psiche in the Villa Farnesina, Rome. The former was illustrated between 1507 and 1508 and has an image identified as the common bean. The Villa Farnesina Loggia was decorated in 1515–1518, with festoons containing three instances of bean pods. Our first objective was to evaluate these images to determine whether they represented depictions of common bean earlier than the illustration by Fuchs. Neither image appears to be a common bean based on a combination of botanical characters and size. Folio 194 of the Grandes Heures d’Anne de Bretagne is most likely a Vigna species in the Ceratotropis subgenus. In the Loggia, one set of pods appears to be a species in the Mimosoideae subfamily and the second and third sets of pods most closely resemble Canavalia gladiata. Neither image likely represents common beans and are probably Old-World species. Secondly, illustrations of common beans from ten early herbals were analyzed for traits that are characteristic of the centers of domestication and races of common beans. Our objective was to characterize the diversity observed among herbals and determine whether beans from both centers of domestication were present. We potentially identified both Middle American, race Mesoamerica and Andean, race Nueva Granada types. We posit that both Middle American and Andean types were in the Caribbean at the time of the Columbian exchange and that beans from both centers were informally introduced into Europe early on. This review of 16th-century manuscripts and illustrations has provided some answers to the questions of what and when common beans reached Europe and provide new hypotheses for researchers studying the origins, diversity, and distribution of this crop.

Palm Oil Diaspora: Afro-Brazilian Landscapes and Economies on Bahia’s Dende Coast by Case Watkins

Watkins’ book provides a master lesson in interdisciplinary history, constructing a detailed analysis of long-term geographical, political, social, and ecological relationships across the Afro-Brazilian diaspora. It is grounded in stories of real people like the enslaved, Brazilian-born Benta, and the landscapes that they inhabit. Drawing on geography and anthropology, Afro-Brazilian and Atlantic studies, and political ecology, Watkins combines ethnographic, historical, and geospatial methods to investigate the linkages of societies, environments, and power. His account illuminates the nuances of the transatlantic “Columbian exchange” in new and surprising ways, within the framework of decolonial theory and practice.1 “Rather than rigid binaries of top-down and reactionary forces, this book traces power through networked and fluid contingencies that coalesce in transatlantic socio-ecological assemblages” (268).The dendê palm and the distinctive red cooking oil that it produces—a core cultural element in Afro-Brazilian cuisine and religions in Bahia, Brazil—provides an ideal vehicle for Watkins to explore how human–environmental relations created innovative, biodiverse communities. As he portrays it, Bahia’s emergent cultural landscapes of dendê offer a counterpoint to the homogeneous monocultural production landscapes of global capitalism that often leave socio-environmental degradation in their wake.Watkins combines photos, texts, and documents, such as ship manifests and estate inventories from archival and other historical sources, with original photographic images and quotations from 453 interviews conducted during a decade of fieldwork in Bahia. He uses landscape interpretation and other geospatial analytical methods to link geo-referenced field locations to historical and current accounts. He skillfully combines these methods as part of a hybrid, “interactive and iterative research strategy” (41), carefully framing and outlining for each chapter research innovations that produced the rich and powerful findings. His reconstruction of the development of Bahia’s palm-oil landscapes, for example, is anchored by two figures that locate the property boundaries of mid-nineteenth-century quilombos (Afro-descendant maroon communities) alongside the current location of quilombos in the same places, now surrounded by “vast monocultures and pastures” (132). In Chapter 6, he explores the evolution of Bahia’s dendê economy through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using probate inventories and other primary documents to reconstruct the history of four Bahian families interlinked by kinship and slavery.The focus on cultural landscapes reveals the contrast between the complex, diversified dendê landscapes that afforded food security, biodiversity, and cultural meanings and the homogenous, modern monocultures that are more legible to public authorities.2 Largely invisible in official statistics and policies, the extensive “semi-wild” groves and forests on Bahia’s Dendê Coast were “planted by vultures” who carried the seeds that were then nurtured by local farmers—based on traditional African practices—through complex interactions between people and places on both sides of the Atlantic. The biodiverse “emergent” groves, which originated as an integral part of transatlantic trade, were recreated in Bahia through cross-species collaborations involving mixed peoples (quilombolas, freed people, enslaved people, and Indigenous), as a form of resistance and resilience during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The evidence shows a surprisingly significant participation by Afro-descendants, including women palm-oil processors and vendors, in direct trade between Africa and Brazil. “This book demonstrates how biodiverse palm groves, as legacies of African knowledge and practice, came to distinguish Bahia’s dendê landscapes despite centuries of colonial mandates and modern development schemes that sought to impose and enforce austere monocultures” (31).Palm Oil Diaspora’s relational approach to interdisciplinary history connects with the concrete struggles and forms of resistance that still characterize the people of Bahia’s Dendê Coast. These people continue to struggle, striving “towards a more cohesive framework of life and livelihoods” that can encompass the virtues of biodiversity, complexity, and cultural meaning (284).

Phylogenetics and Evolution of Potato Virus V: Another Potyvirus that Originated in the Andes.

Potato virus V (PVV) causes a disease of potato (Solanum tubersosum) in South and Central America, Europe, and the Middle East. We report here the complete genomic sequences of 42 new PVV isolates from the potato's Andean domestication center in Peru and of eight historical or recent isolates from Europe. When the principal open reading frames of these genomic sequences together with those of nine previously published genomic sequences were analyzed, only two from Peru and one from Iran were found to be recombinant. The phylogeny of the 56 nonrecombinant open reading frame sequences showed that the PVV population had two major phylogroups, one of which formed three minor phylogroups (A1 to A3) of isolates, all of which are found only in the Andean region of South America (Peru and Colombia), and the other formed two minor phylogroups, a basal one of Andean isolates (A4) that is paraphyletic to a crown cluster containing all the isolates found outside South America (World). This suggests that PVV originated in the Andean region, with only one minor phylogroup spreading elsewhere in the world. In minor phylogroups A1 and A3, there were two subclades on long branches containing isolates from S. phureja evolving more rapidly than the others, and these interfered with dating calculations. Although no temporal signal was directly detected among the dated nonrecombinant sequences, PVV and potato virus Y (PVY) are from the same potyvirus lineage and are ecologically similar, so "subtree dating" was done via a single maximum likelihood phylogeny of PVV and PVY sequences, and PVY's well-supported 157 ce "time to most common recent ancestor" was extrapolated to date that of PVV as 29 bce. Thus the independent historical coincidences supporting the datings of the PVV and PVY phylogenies are the same; PVV arose ≥2,000 years ago in the Andes and was taken to Europe during the Columbian Exchange, where it diversified around 1853 ce, soon after the European potato late blight pandemic. PVV is likely to be more widespread than currently realized and is of biosecurity relevance for world regions that have not yet recorded its presence.[Formula: see text] Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.

The effect of nutritional status on historical infectious disease morbidity: evidence from the London Foundling Hospital, 1892-1919

ABSTRACT There is a complex inter-relationship between nutrition and morbidity in human health. Many diseases reduce nutritional status, but on the other hand, having low nutritional status is also known to make individuals more susceptible to certain diseases and to more serious illness. Modern evidence on these relationships, determined after the introduction of antibiotics and vaccines, may not be applicable to historical settings before these medical technologies were available. This paper uses a historical cohort study based on records from the London Foundling Hospital to determine the causal effect of nutritional status of children, proxied by weight- and height-for-age Z-scores, on the odds of contracting five infectious diseases of childhood (measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox and whooping cough) and on sickness duration from these diseases. I identify a causal effect by exploiting the randomisation of environmental conditions as foundling children were removed from their original homes, then fostered with families in counties nearby London and later returned to the Foundling Hospital’s main site in London. I find no effect of nutritional status on the odds of contracting the five diseases, but I do find a historically important and statistically significant effect of nutritional status on sickness duration for measles and mumps. These findings have three implications. First, historical incidence of these diseases was unrelated to nutritional status, meaning that poor nutritional status during famines or during the Colombian Exchange did not affect the spread of epidemics. However, undernutrition in these events may have exacerbated measles severity. Second, improving nutritional status in the past 150 years would have reduced the severity of measles and mumps infections but not affect the decline in whooping cough mortality. Finally, selective culling effects from measles would be larger than those from whooping cough since whooping cough severity was not correlated with underlying nutritional status.

(Re)Mapping the Columbian Exchange. Suggestions for an Updated Cartography

Following Christopher Columbus’ voyages and the ensuing colonization of the New World by Europeans, a massive multidirectional transfer of biota, diseases, technology and humans occurred between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas. This transfer, known as the Columbian Exchange, is often depicted on maps as a simplified, bidirectional, Atlantic-centred transaction between the Americas and Europe. This paper highlights the shortcomings of such cartographic depictions and posits that they impede effective teaching. We present short histories of sweet potatoes, sugarcane, maize, tomatoes and quinine and use them to illustrate the major cartographic and ideological problems of traditional Columbian Exchange maps, namely constrained geographic scope, chronological compression, non-depiction of the contemporaneous movement of important cultural, technological and biological elements, ethnocentrism and the obscuring of human consequences. Each history is accompanied by a new map of the product’s diffusion, a template for future (re)mappings of the Columbian Exchange.

Latin American bestiary: animals in the historiography of Latin America

The animal history analyzes the relationships between human societies and non-human animals in the past. As an academic subfield, animal history dates back to the 1980s, but it has its antecedents. In Latin America, there is a rich tradition of writing about animals from the sixteenth century onwards. The last decades have seen a large number of historical texts on animals in Latin America that cover various topics: domestic animals, animals and military conquest, animals and science, animals and the Columbian exchange, among others. Brazil, Mexico, and the Caribbean have received much of the attention. This essay recapitulates this literature and identifies patterns, issues, and debates.