{
  "id": "frisoles-y-pallares-de-las-indias",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Frisoles and pallares — the two American beans, named in 1590, resolved by genome in 2014",
  "summary": "Acosta's Seville imprint of 1590 names two pulses the Indians grew for themselves, frisoles and pallares, and states that the European chickpea, broad bean and lentil were not there before the Spaniards. Molina's 1571 dictionary prints a whole bean economy in one column of Nahuatl: the field, the sowing verb, the harvester's name, the boiled bean, the stew, the dough. Modern genomics finds two independent domestications — and measures what breeding since has cost.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "botany",
    "agriculture",
    "columbian-exchange",
    "new-spain",
    "peru",
    "food-security",
    "nahuatl",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "indigenous-knowledge",
    "genetics"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "acosta-historia-natural-y-moral-1590"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "cieza-cronica-del-peru-1553"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "molina-vocabulario-1571"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "quatro-libros-de-la-naturaleza-1615"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "columbian-exchange"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "nixtamalization-and-the-maize-transfer"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "papa-y-chuno-de-los-andes"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "quinua-de-los-andes"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What are frisoles and pallares in sixteenth-century Spanish sources?",
    "How many times were common beans and lima beans domesticated?",
    "What did Nahuatl have words for in bean farming before the conquest?",
    "Did European pulses reach the Americas before or after the Spaniards?",
    "What has modern breeding done to the genetic diversity of beans?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The Seville 1590 Acosta, page 245 of libro quarto, names the two American pulses and maps them onto three European ones in a single sentence: the Indians \"cultiuauan la tierra a pedaços para legumbres, que ellos vsan, como los que llaman Frisoles, y Pallares, que les siruen como aca garuanços, y hauas, y lentejas\". Two American crops, two distinct names, and three European pulses used as the yardstick — the whole comparison set down in one clause of a printed page of 1590.",
      "sources": [
        "acosta-historia-natural-moral-1590"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The same page carries the negative half of the exchange, and it is the more useful half. Acosta writes that he has not established that these European pulses, \"ni otros generos de legumbres de Europa\", were present before the Spaniards entered, and that it is the Spaniards who \"han lleuado ortalizas y legumbres de España, y se dan alla estremadamente\". A Jesuit provincial who had every reason to credit the mission is here recording that the pulses the Indians grew were their own and the ones he recognised were his side's import.",
      "sources": [
        "acosta-historia-natural-moral-1590"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The cost, in the same sentence, is a slight. The clause that preserves the two American pulses opens by faulting Indian horticulture for not looking European: \"yo no he hallado, que los Indios tuuiessen huertos diuersos de ortaliza\". The observation that patches of legumbres are not kitchen gardens is offered as a deficiency, and the reader who wants the botany has to take the judgement with it. It is printed here rather than trimmed.",
      "sources": [
        "acosta-historia-natural-moral-1590"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "Molina's Vocabulario of 1571, in the Nahuatl-to-Castilian half, prints an entire bean economy built on one root. Page 29 of that half carries \"Etl. frisol, o haua\"; \"Etla\" and \"Emilli\", the field or holding of beans; \"Emilla\", the place of one; \"Etlaça.n. sembrar frisoles\"; \"Etlaço\", to sow all the beans; \"Etequi.n. coger frisoles con la mano, o con cuchillo\"; \"Etequiliztli\", the act of that harvesting; \"Etequini. cogedor de frisoles desta manera\"; \"Epauaxtli. frisoles o hauas cozidas\"; \"Emulli\" and \"Epauaxmulli\", the bean stew; and \"Eextli. massa de frisoles o de hauas\". Field, sowing, harvest, harvester, boiled bean, stew and dough, each with its own printed word.",
      "sources": [
        "molina-vocabulario-1571-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "Molina's gloss also records the equation the friars worked with, and its limit. Etl is rendered \"frisol, o haua\" — the American bean given the name of the European broad bean as an alternative, with no note that they are different plants. The dictionary that preserves the Nahua bean vocabulary is simultaneously the document that begins collapsing two genera into one Castilian word, and later Spanish usage followed the dictionary rather than the plant.",
      "sources": [
        "molina-vocabulario-1571-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "Cieza de León had put beans on the Peruvian coast thirty-seven years earlier, and misfiled them. On the leaf numbered lxxxij of the Seville 1553 Crónica del Perú, in the chapter on the fertility of the lowland valleys, he writes that the Indians sow maize and take two crops a year, that in places they plant yuca and raise sweet potatoes, \"y assi mismo ay algunas papas, y muchos frisoles, y otras rayzes gustosas\" — the beans counted among the roots. The earliest printed notice of the crop in Peru is also an early instance of a European classifying an American plant by the company it kept in the field.",
      "sources": [
        "cieza-cronica-del-peru-sevilla-1553"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "Beans reach the 1615 Quatro libros as a drink. On leaf 136, among the atoles, the printing describes \"yzquiatolli, que no es otra cosa sino atole con frisoles cozidos con el chilatolli\", the maize dough added half-way through the cooking and the herb epaçotl with it. Confidence is set at 0.75 because the Nahuatl name normally points to toasted maize rather than to beans, and what is recorded here is what the sheet says, not a reconstruction of the recipe.",
      "sources": [
        "ximenez-quatro-libros-1615"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "What the two names turned out to be. The 2014 reference genome of the common bean reports that Phaseolus vulgaris was independently domesticated \"nearly 8,000 years ago\" in what is now Mexico and in South America; that the wild Andean gene pool had separated from the wild Mesoamerican pool about 165,000 years ago, with a confidence interval of 146,000 to 184,000 years, the Andean founders passing through a bottleneck lasting some 76,000 years; and that fewer than 10 per cent of the 74 Mb of sequence implicated in domestication is shared between the two events. Two peoples, two continents, two separate acts of plant breeding on the same species.",
      "sources": [
        "schmutz-2014-common-bean-dual-domestications"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The pallar has its own geography, and it is contested. A 2017 genome-wide study of Phaseolus lunatus places the crop in three pools — Mesoamerican I in central-western Mexico, Mesoamerican II from southern and eastern Mexico into Central America, and Andean I in Ecuador and northern Peru, which is the pallar of Acosta's Peru. Its authors report that \"higher statistical support was given to the single domestication scenario in central-western Mexico followed by admixture with wild populations\", so the Mesoamerican II landraces are read as admixed rather than as a third domestication. Confidence is 0.8: this is the better supported of several competing models, not a settled count.",
      "sources": [
        "chacon-martinez-2017-lima-bean-domestication"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "The bill for the journey out of the Americas has been measured. A 2019 analysis of SSR diversity from wild types through landraces to United States advanced cultivars puts the total post-domestication reduction in number of alleles, allele richness and genetic diversity at 0.33, 0.39 and 0.17 for the Andean gene pool and 0.27, 0.32 and 0.16 for the Mesoamerican, and observes that modern breeding stripped out more diversity than the original domestication did. The two farming traditions Acosta saw in patches lost less of the plant than the twentieth century did.",
      "sources": [
        "gioia-2019-bean-ssr-diversity"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "What none of these sources supports, said plainly. The three printings read here describe the bean as a going concern and say nothing about how its cultivation fared under colonial rule; the modern genetics dates domestication and measures diversity but attributes the heaviest losses to modern breeding, not to the conquest. This object therefore makes no claim that Spanish rule either damaged or protected American bean farming. The question is open, and the sources on this shelf cannot close it.",
      "sources": [
        "acosta-historia-natural-moral-1590",
        "gioia-2019-bean-ssr-diversity"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper",
      "industry_observation"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English coverage of the common bean is either a nutrition page or a line in a Columbian-Exchange list, and the sixteenth-century record behind it is never quoted. This object opens with the 1590 Seville sheet read as a scan, where frisoles and pallares are named side by side and mapped onto garbanzos, habas and lentils, and where the same author states that the European pulses were not there before his countrymen were. It then prints thirteen entries from one column of Molina's 1571 dictionary — bean field, sow, harvest, harvester, boiled bean, stew, dough — which is a denser record of pre-conquest bean agriculture than any modern summary offers, and notes that the same gloss begins conflating etl with the European haua. Against those it sets the 2014 dual-domestication genome and the 2019 diversity accounting, so a reader can see the two names of 1590 and the two domestications of 8,000 years ago on the same page. It also records the slight Acosta attaches to his own observation, and refuses the colonial-decline claim that its sources do not support.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-17",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/frisoles-y-pallares-de-las-indias",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/frisoles-y-pallares-de-las-indias.json",
  "jsonld": {
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    "name": "Frisoles and pallares — the two American beans, named in 1590, resolved by genome in 2014",
    "description": "Acosta's Seville imprint of 1590 names two pulses the Indians grew for themselves, frisoles and pallares, and states that the European chickpea, broad bean and lentil were not there before the Spaniards. Molina's 1571 dictionary prints a whole bean economy in one column of Nahuatl: the field, the sowing verb, the harvester's name, the boiled bean, the stew, the dough. Modern genomics finds two independent domestications — and measures what breeding since has cost.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/frisoles-y-pallares-de-las-indias",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-17",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana, compuesto por el muy Reuerendo Padre Fray Alonso de Molina, dela Orden del bienauenturado nuestro Padre sant Francisco",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=IK4rAQAAMAAJ&pg=PP3"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Quatro libros de la naturaleza, y virtudes de las plantas, y animales que estan receuidos en el vso de medicina en la Nueua España",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=qQpFp_bImPMC&pg=PP1"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Historia natural y moral de las Indias, en que se tratan las cosas notables del cielo, y elementos, metales, plantas, y animales dellas: y los ritos, y ceremonias, leyes, y gouierno, y guerras de los Indios",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=26zAd4TrWXsC&pg=PA1"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Parte primera de la chronica del Peru. Que tracta la demarcacion de sus prouincias: la descripcion dellas. Las fundaciones de las nueuas ciudades. Los ritos y costumbres de los indios. Y otras cosas estrañas dignas de ser sabidas",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=PpNbAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP7"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "A reference genome for common bean and genome-wide analysis of dual domestications",
        "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7048698/"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Testing Domestication Scenarios of Lima Bean (Phaseolus lunatus L.) in Mesoamerica: Insights from Genome-Wide Genetic Markers",
        "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5601060/"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Evolution of SSR diversity from wild types to U.S. advanced cultivars in the Andean and Mesoamerican domestications of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris)",
        "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6354994/"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Frisoles and pallares — the two American beans, named in 1590, resolved by genome in 2014"
  }
}