Definition: Guilá Naquitz is a small cave located within the eastern range of mountains in the Valley of Oaxaca. The site was occupied at least six times between 8000 and 6500 BC, by hunters and gatherers, probably during the fall (October to December) of the year.
A wide range of plant food was recovered within the cave deposits of Guilá Naquitz, including acorn, pinyon, cactus fruits, hackberries, and most importantly, the wild forms of bottle gourd, squash and beans. Researchers have taken this to be evidence of early cultivation of bottle gourd, squash and beans.
Three cobs of teosinte (the wild progenitor of maize) were found within the deposits and direct-dated by AMS radiocarbon dating to about 5400 years old; they show some signs of domestication. If that is correct, the Guila Naquitz domesticated teosinte is older than that from the Tehuacan valley sites by about 700 years.
Guilá Naquitz was excavated in the 1970s by a team from the University of Michigan led by Kent Flannery.
Sources
This glossary entry is part of the Guide to the Domestication of Corn and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Benz, Bruce. 2005. Archaeological evidence of teosinte domestication from Guilá Naquitz, Oaxaca. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98(4):2104-2106.
Flannery, Kent V. 1986. Guilá Naquitz: Archaic Foraging and Early agriculture in Oaxaca, Mexico. Academic Press, New York.
Marcus, Joyce and Kent V. Flannery. 2005. The coevolution of ritual and society: New 14C dates from ancient Mexico. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101(52):18257-18261
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