ABSTRACT
Carl Sauer and his geography students found evidence to the contrary, that the sweet potato was taken to Central Polynesia, maize to India and perhaps independently to China, and peanuts to China. Sauer emphasized fieldwork, surveying and recording plants and their ecological contexts, coupled with research in archives to discover first documentations of plants and subsequent distributions. The Sauer method of historical cultural geography produced dozens of anomalies to the reigning paradigm of America's isolation. Historical plant geography demands expertise in genetics and ancient texts as well as identification and mapping of plant distributions. Unpleasant though they are, tropical parasitic worms exclusively infesting humans are perhaps the strongest evidence for pre-Columbian voyaging between Southeast Asia-Oceania and South America. Maize phytoliths recovered from pre-Columbian levels in professionally, soundly excavated sites would be the strongest evidence. They may turn up, with a probability slightly greater than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.
