Pine nuts are an important and tasty element of modern cuisine, and they have 7,500 years of history to prove it.
During the months of August and September, the mountains of the Great Basin and California are redolent with the aroma of native conifers, pine trees such as cedar, ponderosa pine, juniper, and piñon pine. The piñon pine (Pinus edulis or P. monophylla) is the New Mexico state tree, and it is especially pungent in the fall of the year, when hundreds of New Mexicans drive up into the arid mountain forests to harvest the pine nut, a main ingredient in some versions of pesto, and a subsistence crop that has been part of the diet of people of the American Southwest and Great Basin for at least 7,500 years. Other species of edible pine nuts found in North America and used during the prehistoric period include ponderosa pine (P. ponderosa), sugar pine (P. sabiniana), and torrey pine (P. torreyana).
While all pine trees produce edible nuts, the piñon pine (also spelled pinyon) produces a tasty, calorie-rich nut prized by cooks all over the world. Excavations in the eastern Great Basin at Danger Cave, Utah have identified piñon nuts in levels dated between 6,700 and 7,400 years ago; and possibly as early as 10,000 years ago.
Harvesting Pine Nuts
How people harvested pine nuts is speculation, but ethnographically, the method consists of picking pine cones, piling them up in the center of a clearing, covering them with pine needles and lighting the pile. The firing process doesn't open the cones, but removes the sticky pine pitch, roasts the nuts and makes the cone easier to split. Splitting the cone is accomplished with a stone or metal tool. In a 1982 study, Farris (quoted in Gamble and Mattingly) described what he believed would be evidence of pine-nut processing, if discovered in the vicinity of pine trees: stone knives (and sharpening debris) to cut the cone off the tree, fire cracked rock concentrations, a metate or flat stone and cobbles to cracked the fired pine nuts, and burned cones and nuts.
In a 2012 study of the Torrey Reserve on the California coast, Gamble and Mattingly describe a series of fire-cracked rock concentrations that they conclude are examples of pine nut processing areas used in historic times by the nearby Kumeyaay village of Ystagua.
The flavorful pine nut was harvested in the mountains of New Mexico in quantities for sale throughout the world by World War II; over 8 million pounds were harvested in 1936 alone. Today, as in the 1930s, piñon nuts are harvested by hand and sold to middlemen parked on old U.S. 66, who in turn sell the nuts to distributors world wide. However, political issues such as grazing and mining rights, environmental degradation of some of the range areas where piñon is grown, combined with competition from foreign markets have reduced the crop considerably.
Other Uses for Pinon Trees
Pines tend to grow tall and straight, and their trunks are terrifically shaped to be useful for house construction. Ponderosa and pinyon pine timbers were used for house construction, as roofs over masonry walls or pit houses, throughout the southwest. This fact is often cheered by archaeologists, because tree ring data is available for both these species of pine, and thus can be used to date the construction periods of houses in which they are used.
Sources
Dutcher BH. 1893. Piñon Gathering among the Panamint Indians. American Anthropologist 6(4):377-380.
Gamble LH, and Mattingly S. 2012. Pine Nut Processing in Southern California: Is the Absence of Evidence the Evidence of Absence? American Antiquity 77(1):263–278.
Janetski JC, Bodily ML, Newbold BA, and Yoder DT. 2012. Paleoarchaic to Early Archaic Transition on the Colorado Plateau: The Archaeology of North Creek Shelter. American Antiquity 77(1):125 – 159.
Minnis PE. 1989. Prehistoric Diet in the Northern Southwest: Macroplant Remains from Four Corners Feces. American Antiquity 54(3):543-563.
Rhode D, and Madsen DB. 1998. Pine nut use in the Early Holocene and beyond: The Danger Cave archaeobotanical record. Journal of Archaeological Science 25:1199-1210.
Varien MD, Ortman SG, Kohler TA, Glowacki DM, and Johnson CD. 2007. Historical Ecology in the Mesa Verde Region: Results from the Village Ecodynamics Project. American Antiquity 72(2):273-300.
