SC - Quantities of salt and spices used.

[Matthew Legge]

> At 5:07 PM -0500 1/31/99, LrdRas at aol.com wrote:
> 
> >Does not the archeological finds of anchor stones from Chinese junkets
> off the
> >the west coast of the states make an equally valid observation that
> peanuts
> >MAY have been introduced  to the New World by Chinese traders during
> pre-
> >Columbian times?
> >
> I'm not up on the current literature, pro and con, on pre-columbian
> contacts with the New World--my impression is that the facts are very much
> disputed.
> 
There is evidence in the Imperial records that an expedition sailed from
China to the west coast of North America, conducted some exploration, and
returned to China.  The anchor stones found off the Washington coast are
considered to be evidence of the veracity of the account.  There is no
evidence that the Chinese traveled farther south than California.

> The problem is that we know that certain food plants, including peanuts,
> capsicums, and maize, spread very fast once they were introduced after
> Columbus. Capsicums, after all, give you a substitute for black pepper
> that
> people can grow in their back yards in temperate climates. So I find it
> implausible that they could have been introduced earlier, used in China
> enough to leave evidence in the archaeological record, yet didn't spread.
> Not impossible, but implausible.
> 
> David/Cariadoc
> http://www.best.com/~ddfr/
> 
Waverly Root places the introduction of the peanut into China in the early
17th Century via the Spanish in Singapore.  The comment is also made that
the peanut is of South American origin and was not observed north of Mexico
by the early explorers.  It appears to have been imported into North America
in the 18th Century.

These observations do not preclude the peanut from early diffusion to Asia,
but they make it questionable.

There is a form of maize of Chinese origin, but it is genetically distinct
from New World maize to the extent that the divergence between the plants is
probably prehistoric.

Bear 
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