Gourd Lore HWSM 01 016

2021-11-16T00:00:00Z

Gourd Lore "The greatest controversy among gourd lore concerns the bottle gourd or calabash, Lagenaria siceraria , which is also called the Pre-Columbian gourd. This is one of the plants that was used for containers in both the Old and New World before Columbus discovered America. Records of the fruits come from Peru (7000 B.C.), Thailand (7000 B.C.), Mexico (2700 B.C.), and Egypt (2500 B.C.), even though the genus Lagenaria is native to Africa! Some authors have used the bottle gourd as evidence that there was pre-Columbian cultural exchange. However, experiments have shown that dried, sealed bottle gourds can float for as long as two years in seawater without killing the seeds; it is likely that bottle gourds floated between the continents and were picked up in the New World and adopted for uses there. Interestingly, in western Africa (e.g., Nigeria), certain tribes use the gourd in an annual fishing festival in which the gourds are floated on the water. One fruit making a successful trans-Atlantic voyage to the coast of Brazil from Africa would have been sufficient to establish the plant in the New World." Gibson, Arthur C. "Cucurbitaceae--Fruits for Peons, Pilgrims, and Pharaohs." Economic Botany . self published, nd. https://web.archive.org/web/20010424090746/http://www.botgard.ucla.edu/html/botanytextbooks/economicbotany/Cucurbita/index.html