As food writer and gardener Andrew Moore writes, “Pawpaw seeds and other remnants have been found at archaeological sites of the earliest Native Americans, and in large, concentrated amounts, which suggests seasonal feasts of the fruit.” According to Moore, “whether at Meadowcroft or the rugged hills of Arkansas, the earliest Americans put pawpaws to great use.” Pawpaw is also found in Ontario, Canada.Īrchaeological data demonstrates the significance of pawpaw to early Indigenous diets. What is now known scientifically as Asimina triloba is considered indigenous to twenty-six states in the eastern United States, from New York and Michigan in the north to northern Florida in the south, and to Texas, Nebraska, and Kansas in the west. However, as José Hormaza argues, pawpaw was able to survive because it could easily produce “numerous root suckers that form pawpaw patches in the wild.” Some archaeologists believe that the movement of Iroquois populations contributed to the dispersal of pawpaw north. The extinction of these herbivores by the end of the Pleistocene era meant that the distribution of such plants was constricted.
Scientists hypothesize that the pawpaw may have been one of many large fruits distributed by herbivores in Central America. I think it’s been ignored, disliked, and unavailable.” Devon Mihesuah argues, “I’m not sure that it’s been forgotten.
As scholar of Indigenous foodways and member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma Dr. Perhaps the question we should be asking is not how pawpaw was forgotten, but rather whether pawpaw was forgotten at all.īut perhaps the question we should be asking is not how pawpaw was forgotten, but rather whether pawpaw was forgotten at all.
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