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Location: Oaxaca Valley, Mexico View Map
Guilá Naquitz Cave lies at the eastern end of the Oaxaca Valley in southern Mexico, about (3.11 miles) northwest of Mitla. It sits at the base of a cliff that rises 300 m above the valley floor, at an elevation of 1,926 m. The name “Guilá Naquitz” is said to mean “White Cliff” in Zapotec. The cave holds the earliest known evidence of a domesticated crop in the Americas, the squash Cucurbita pepo, along with early maize, bottle gourds and beans. For the wider region, see Oaxaca.
Occupation
The earliest human traces in the cave date to about 10,750 years BP (Before Present). People did not live there year-round or continuously. They used the cave in six separate periods between about 10,750 and 8,900 years BP, and again from about 1,300 to 500 years BP. The early occupants were hunter-gatherers without pottery, who stayed only from August to between October and December.
Nearby woods and grassland supplied acorns, prickly pear, agave, mesquite pods, wild onions, wild beans and other plants.
Squash: The First Crop
The earliest known evidence of the domestication of Cucurbita, which is native to the Americas, dates back 8,000–10,750 years BP, predating the domestication of other crops such as maize and beans in the region by about 4,000 years.
Wikipedia, "Guilá Naquitz Cave", accessed 28 October 2026
Squash was domesticated here about 4,000 years before maize and beans.
The evidence for domestication is physical. In the younger layers of the cave, squash rinds become thicker and the stems (peduncles) grow larger. By about 8,000 years BP, the stems are always more than 10 mm thick, while wild Cucurbita stems stay below that. Over the same period, average rind thickness rises from 0.84 mm to 1.15 mm. Changes in fruit shape and colour show deliberate breeding by 8,000 years BP at the latest.
Some researchers question what the earlier dates of about 10,000 BP mean. Squash remains alone do not prove a shift to farming, because the plant assemblage stays much the same for the next two thousand years. For more on early squash, see Cucurbita: cultivation Before the Great Flood.
Maize
The cave’s maize cobs are dated to 5,420 ± 60 and 5,410 ± 40 years BP, about 700 years older than the earliest cobs from the Tehuacán Valley. They show early signs of domestication:
- The rachis no longer breaks apart on its own, so the grains stay on the cob.
- The cobs carry two to four rows of grain, unlike wild teosinte.
- The glumes are thinner, which makes the grain easier to reach.
Pollen studies and the spread of modern maize suggest the plant was first domesticated in another part of Mexico.
Excavation History
The squash evidence came from Guilá Naquitz and four other Mexican caves during excavations in the 1960s, possibly beginning in 1959. Kent V. Flannery of the University of Michigan directed the project “Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca” from 1966 to 1980. He published the cave in Guila Naquitz: Archaic Foraging and Early Agriculture in Oaxaca, Mexico (1985). Later dating with accelerator mass spectrometry refined the dates.
The cave has five layers, up to (55.1 inches) deep, and stone tools were found in them. Flannery and his colleagues note that “winter crops cannot be grown” in the area, and that steep slopes and thin soil would have ruled out larger-scale farming. This fits a cave used by a small group for part of the year.
Significance
The site shows farming in Mesoamerica emerging slowly, over thousands of years. Squash came first, then maize, then beans, the crops later grown together as the “Three Sisters”. These staples later fed the civilisations of the Zapotec and the Maya. For other views on the origins of farming, see Agriculture: Who Taught the First Farmers?.
