538 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1961 



possible that the vernacular name "kumara" is of Polynesian origin 

 and reached Peru together with the plant.^ 



A second plant grown in pre-Columbian times both on the Ameri- 

 can Continent and in the Pacific islands is the bottle gourd, LagenaHa 

 siceraria (Mol.) Standi. As a food crop this species was unimportant, 

 but as a supplier of containers for water and other liquids it was and 

 still is an extremely significant plant in tropical countries. Without 

 doubt this species is of African origin. It was found in the Egyptian 

 royal graves dating from 3000 B.C., and Captain Cook reported it as 

 grown in Polynesia on his first voyage in 1769. The use of the bottle 

 gourd spread from Africa over the Old World, and Eames and St. 

 John (1943) believed that the distribution both on the American 

 mainland and in the Pacific could be explained, as in the case of the 

 sweet potato, by a hypothetical canoe expedition from Polynesia to 

 Peru as suggested by Buck (1937). The Polynesian travelers would 

 have taken the bottle gourd to South America with them and on the 

 return voyage they would have brought back the sweet potato. Plow- 

 ever, more recently discovered data have made this hypothesis unten- 

 able, because archeological investigations in Peru have indicated that 

 bottle gourd remains were, according to radiocarbon dating, 3,000 to 

 5,000 years old. This means that the species had been used in Peru 

 long before the Polynesians lived in the Pacific islands. It is of 

 course possible that Polynesian canoe expeditions fetched bottle 

 gourds from Peru rather than having introduced them into that coun- 

 try. Pleyerdahl believes that the bottle gourd reached South America 

 at that early date through navigators from Africa, and that from 

 Peru, together with the sweet potato, it reached Polynesia when those 

 islands were populated by Peruvian pre-Incas. 



Therefore the history of the distribution of the bottle gourd all 

 over the Tropics is still unknown. In addition to the distribution by 

 migrating pre-Incas, as suggested by Heyerdahl, the possibilities exist 

 either that the gourd was taken home by a Polynesian canoe expedi- 

 tion that visited South America, or that it was introduced into Poly- 



2 For a discussion of the sweet potato problem, see also Hornell (1946). Very Interesting 

 comments on the sweet potato were made at the recent 10th Pacific Science Congress, In 

 Honolulu, at a symposium entitled "Plants and the Migrations of Pacific Peoples," con- 

 vened by Dr. Jacques Barrau on Aug. 28, 1961. At this symposium Dr. Douglas B. Yen 

 expressed the opinion that Ipomoea batatas, a hexaplold and heterozygous species, was of 

 hybrid origin in America, where the greatest morphological variability of the cultivated 

 plant is seen. He pointed out that the species frequently produces seeds, each of which 

 has the potential of developing into a distinct race, and that transportation could con- 

 ceivably have been by nonhuman agencies. Dr. Ichlzo Nlshiyama Indicated the probability 

 that T. batatas was derived from the American Ipomoea triflda (H.B.K.) Don, also a 

 hexaplold. In the same symposium Dr. Harold C. Conklin presented linguistic evidence 

 to Indicate that the sweet potato in Africa, Indonesia, and adjacent regions was almost 

 certainly a European introduction. This symposium, which one hopes may be published 

 in full, reached no conclusion as to the identity of the humans who may have first 

 transported the sweet potato across the eastern Pacific. 



