This weekly feature is a place to discuss new developments in fields of history and archaeology. This can be newly discovered documents and archaeological sites, recent publications, documents that have just become publicly available through digitization or the opening of archives, and new theories and interpretations.
Chilis and papayas in Florida, 2000 years ago!
This is more "new to me" since I missed out on the papers that discussed this a few years ago. Luckily I plundered into a casual reference to it last week. It's good evidence for early interactions between people in the Caribbean (who came up from South America) and people in mainland North America. The seeds were found at Pineland Site's Old Mound, which is outside the native range of either. The seeds are intermediate between the wild type and the modern domesticated types. Though in the case of the papaya seeds, that's considering them as a whole. Some are pretty much wild seeds, while others are very close to modern domesticated seeds in appearance, with a few in the middle.
Apparently I should have looked into The Archaeology of Pineland: A Coastal Southwest Florida Site Complex, A.d. 50-1710 and related material a lot sooner.