Calabazas de las Indias — American squash in the 1590 record, and a word that names two plants
Acosta's Seville imprint of 1590 separates the squashes "proprias de la tierra, que alla llaman Çapallos" from gourds in general, gives their food and vessel uses, and in the same paragraph records European vegetables taking hold in the Indies. Modern genetics confirms the split he sensed: Cucurbita is American and ten thousand years old, the bottle gourd is Asian. The book also contradicts itself, and that page is here too.
Why this wins its question: Squash is the member of the three sisters that English-language writing skips: maize and beans get histories, squash gets a line in a Thanksgiving article. This object opens with the actual sixteenth-century page — Acosta separating the squashes "proprias de la tierra, que alla llaman Çapallos" from gourds at large, a thousand kinds of them, eaten in Lent, their rind halved into hampers and worked into cups — and then does two things no popular account does. It prints the page where the same book contradicts its own claim that Indians kept no gardens, by listing calabaças growing on the Mexico lagoon. And it uses ancient DNA to show that the word in every Spanish source names two unrelated plants, one American and ten thousand years domesticated, one Asian, so the next reader of these texts is warned before the false positive rather than after it.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias, Seville 1590, closes its chapter on the garden plants of the Indies — the chapter that ends on page 246, immediately before "CAP. 20. De el Axi, o Pimienta de las Indias" — with the squashes, and marks off the American ones by their Quechua name: "Pues las Calabaças de Indias es otra monstruosidad, de su grandeza y vicio con que se crian, especialmente las que son proprias de la tierra, que alla llaman Çapallos, cuya carne sirue para comer, especialmente en Quaresma cozida, o guisada. Ay de este genero de calabaças mil diferencias". A thousand differences within the kind, the flesh eaten boiled or stewed, and Lent as the season that made it useful to Spaniards.
The uses run past food, and the sentence continues across the page break onto 246: some are "tan disformes de grandes, que dexandolas secar, hazen de su corteza … cortada por medio y limpia como canastos, en que ponen todo el adereço para vna comida: de otros pequeños hazen vasos para comer, o beuer, y labranlos graciosamente para diuersos vsos." Rind halved and cleaned as hampers for carrying a whole meal's provision, small ones worked into eating and drinking vessels and decorated. A European reader in 1590 is being told that these plants are containers as much as crops.
On the same page 245 the exchange is shown running both ways in one paragraph, and the author's limits with it. Acosta writes that he has not found that the Indians had varied kitchen gardens, "sino que 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", and that neither these nor other European legumes were there before the Spaniards came, "los quales han lleuado ortalizas y legumbres de España, y se dan alla estremadamente" — with the melons of the valley of Ica in Peru as his example, rooting into a stock that lasts years and is pruned like a tree.
The same book then contradicts that judgement, and the contradiction is worth more than either half alone. In the Historia moral, page 472, Acosta recounts the tribute the Mexica were ordered to bring to Azcapotzalco and says they brought "la sementera hecha en el agua, y lleuada por el agua, en la qual auia mucho mayz (que es su trigo) granado ya con sus maçorcas, auia Chili, o axi, auia bledos, tomates, frisoles, chia, calabaças, y otras muchas cosas todo crecido y de sazon" — and, against readers who would call it a fable or a demon's trick, insists "en realidad de verdad es cosa muy hazedera, y se ha hecho muchas vezes, hazer sementera mouediza en el agua". Squash stands there inside a full Mesoamerican polyculture grown on the Mexico lagoon, which is precisely the horticulture page 245 says he never found.
What the squashes turned out to be. A 2015 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences dates the domestication of Cucurbita from about ten thousand years before present across several American regions, with Cucurbita pepo ssp. pepo originating in the Valley of Oaxaca around 10,000 BP, an independent domestication of C. pepo ssp. ovifera in eastern North America and of C. argyrosperma and C. moschata in Mesoamerica — at least five domesticated species, with wild precursors including C. pepo ssp. ovifera var. ozarkana and var. texana and C. pepo ssp. fraterna in north-eastern Mexico. The paper also argues that wild Cucurbita, defended by bitter cucurbitacins tolerable to large herbivores and recovered from mastodon dung deposits, was coadapted to a megafaunal landscape: domestication is what carried the genus past the extinction of its dispersers.
Acosta's careful qualifier — the ones "proprias de la tierra" — was doing real work, and a warning for anyone searching sixteenth-century Spanish for this crop. A 2005 PNAS study of archaeological rind found that every pre-contact American bottle-gourd fragment yielding DNA matched the modern Asian reference group, while a single post-contact specimen carried African markers; Lagenaria siceraria was most likely carried into the Americas by Paleoindian populations rather than drifting from Africa, was present as a domesticate by 10,000 BP, and was a utility plant valued for containers and fishing floats rather than for food, unlike the Cucurbita squashes. The Spanish word calabaza covers both. A hit on it in a printed source is not evidence about American squash until the sentence has been read for which plant it is about — the same trap this corpus records for the word quinua.
The limit of this entry, said plainly. Nothing read here dates the arrival of Cucurbita in Europe, Africa or Asia, names a ship or a year, or shows a sixteenth-century European sowing of American squash. The 1590 imprint is evidence that Spanish natural history described and distinguished these plants for European readers within seventy years of the fall of Mexico; it is not evidence of a transfer this object has not sourced, and the claim that Spain carried squash to the Old World is left unmade rather than assumed. The European herbals that would settle it were probed for and are not reachable from this container.