Guila Naquitz

The Guila Naquitz cave, excavated in the 1960s by Kent Flannery, provides a good picture of early domestication in Highland Mesoamerica. Here small groups of people, probably only a single family at a time, lived in­termittently (and probably seasonally) over a period of 2,000 years (ca. 8900 B.C.-6700 B.C.), the period during which plants were domesticated. The cave itself is located in the thorn forest of the upper piedmont above the floor of the Valley of Oaxaca. The residents of Guila Naquitz hunted deer and peccary (a wild piglike animal) with spears and spear-throwers, and trapped small animals such as rabbits. They also collected plant foods from the surrounding area, particularly prickly pear fruits, cherries, acorns, and pinion nuts from the forests above the cave, along with agave hearts, onions, and various other nuts and fruits from a variety of thorn forest plants."

Also found in Guila Naquitz cave is the remains of do­mesticated plants, including bottle gourd and several vari­eties of squashes. How did these come to be in the cave? Were the inhabitants planting fields of squashes? Probably not in the way one thinks of planting a field today. Squashes are common wild plants in Highland Mesoamerica, and thrive in disturbed soils such as those outside of caves. It may be that the inhabitants of the Guila Naquitz cave knew squashes would grow easily near their cave, and so actively planted some with better-tasting flesh or larger seeds than those that might naturally grow there.⁵⁶ Domestication and the use of domesticated plants would be rather informal—a supple­ment to a diet already rich in animal and plant species. This picture seems much different from that at Near Eastern sites such as Ali Kosh and Çatal Hüyük. Domestication in Guila Naquitz appears to have been accomplished by hunters and gatherers who supplemented their basic diet with some de­sired plants (squashes with tasty flesh, for example); there was no "revolution" that enabled the people to rely on do­mesticated plants.

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