In October, orange pumpkins fill porches across the United States and Canada, farm stands, grocery-store bins and, more and more, Halloween parties in Mexico. They seem so thoroughly North American, so straight out of a movie, that it’s hard to picture their story starting in a cave in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, some ten thousand years ago, when someone saved the seeds of a wild squash to plant again.
The Halloween pumpkin belongs to the species Cucurbita pepo, and the oldest known domesticated seeds of it come from Guilá Naquitz cave, in Oaxaca, between 8,000 and 10,000 years old. It’s one of the oldest cultivated plants in the Americas, a companion of corn and beans in the milpa. From there it traveled to Europe in the sixteenth century, and today it’s grown above all in India and China.
Is the pumpkin really Mexican?
The Halloween pumpkin, yes. But “pumpkin” and “squash” are names for many plants, and the full story is more interesting.
Every squash and pumpkin of the genus Cucurbita is from the Americas. What they don’t have is a single birthplace: genetic studies count at least six separate domestications, in different parts of the continent. Peoples who never knew each other did the same thing, each on their own: pick the least bitter squashes, save their seeds and plant them again, generation after generation.
| Species | Where it was domesticated | We know it as |
|---|---|---|
| Cucurbita pepo | Southern Mexico (Oaxaca); and again, separately, in what is now the eastern United States | The Halloween pumpkin, zucchini, acorn squash, summer squash |
| Cucurbita argyrosperma | Southwestern Mexico, the same region as corn | The cushaw, and the squash whose seeds go into Mexican pipián |
| Cucurbita maxima | South America, from a wild squash of Argentina and Bolivia | Hubbard and buttercup squash, and the giant pumpkins |
| Cucurbita moschata | Debated: probably northern South America, though some propose Mesoamerica | Butternut squash, and most canned pumpkin |
| Cucurbita ficifolia | From the Americas; its exact origin is still unresolved | Figleaf gourd, chilacayote in Mexico |
So the complete answer is this: the Halloween pumpkin is Mexican; the giant ones at the fair are South American; and all of them are from the Americas. And one branch of Cucurbita pepo was domesticated independently right here, in the eastern United States, long before Europeans arrived.
Pumpkin or squash: what’s the difference?
Botanically, there isn’t a clean one. “Pumpkin” is what English speakers call the round, orange, thick-skinned kinds, and “squash” covers most of the rest, but the same species can wear either name: a zucchini and a jack-o’-lantern pumpkin are both Cucurbita pepo.
The words themselves come from two very different places:
| Word | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Pumpkin | From English pompion, by way of French pompon and Latin pepo, from Greek pépōn: “melon,” “ripened by the sun.” It’s the same root as the scientific name Cucurbita pepo |
| Squash | From the Narragansett (Algonquian) word askutasquash, recorded in English in the 1640s. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it literally means “the things that may be eaten raw” |
| Calabaza | Spanish, and much older than the voyage of Columbus: in the tenth century it named an Old World bottle gourd. When the Spanish met the American squashes, they used the name they already had |
| Ayote | From the Nahuatl ayotli, “squash.” Used in Mexico and Central America |
| Zapallo | From the Quechua sapallu. The general word across South America |
What does the milpa have to do with it?
Everything. The Mexican pumpkin grew up in the milpa and with the milpa.
The milpa is the traditional way of planting in Mexico and Central America: corn, beans and squash grow together in the same plot, along with chiles, tomatoes and wild greens. The word comes from the Nahuatl milpan: milli, “planted field,” and pan, “on top of.” North of the border, the same partnership is known through Indigenous agriculture as the Three Sisters.
Each plant helps the others:
- Corn grows tall and serves as a pole for the beans.
- Beans climb the corn and return nutrients to the soil.
- Squash spreads across the ground with its big leaves, which shade the soil, hold in moisture and keep weeds down.
The three complement each other on the plate too: tortillas, beans and squash, a complete meal that’s been eaten in Mexico for thousands of years.
Which came to the milpa first? The Oaxaca squash seeds are between 8,000 and 10,000 years old; the oldest known corn, found in the state of Guerrero, about 8,700. For a while it was said that squash was domesticated thousands of years before corn. With today’s dates the gap is much shorter, and at the Guerrero site they appear together. What’s certain is that squash was among the first plants ever sown in the Americas.
How did it spread around the world?
By ship, in the exchange that followed 1492. And you can follow its trail through paintings.
- 1503–1508. The French painter Jean Bourdichon draws a squash in a prayer book for Queen Anne of Brittany. It’s a wild-looking form of Cucurbita pepo: the oldest known European image of an American squash.
- 1515–1518. In Rome, Giovanni da Udine paints garlands of fruits and vegetables on the ceilings of the Villa Farnesina. Among them are American squashes of several species, including the first known image of Cucurbita maxima, the South American one.
- 1542. The German botanist Leonhart Fuchs includes two American squashes in his great book of plants.
Within a few decades squash was being grown in Europe, and from there it spread to Africa and Asia. Today, according to the FAO, the countries that grow the most pumpkins and squash are India and China, followed by Egypt, Russia and Ukraine. Mexico ranked eleventh in 2024. The plant that came out of a cave in Oaxaca went around the world and is now harvested mostly on the other side of the planet.
How did it end up at Halloween?
By a swap of vegetables, in a holiday that came from Britain and Ireland. In Ireland and Scotland people carved lanterns from turnips on autumn nights; when those families emigrated to North America in the nineteenth century, they found the pumpkin, big and easy to hollow out, and the turnip was left behind.
By February 1852 the carved pumpkin already appears in a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Feathertop,” in which a witch cuts eyes and a mouth into a pumpkin to make a scarecrow’s head. The story of that lantern, and of the man who’s said to carry it, is in the legend of the jack-o’-lantern. And the one about the figure with a pumpkin head is in why there are scarecrows at Halloween.
How do giant pumpkins get so big?
With a different species and years of patience. Contest pumpkins are Cucurbita maxima, the South American species, and nearly all of them descend from one variety, ‘Atlantic Giant’, credited to Howard Dill, a farmer in Nova Scotia, Canada, in the late 1970s. They grow so large because their stems move far more food into the fruit than an ordinary pumpkin’s do.
The heaviest pumpkin in the world, according to Guinness World Records, weighed 2,819 pounds (1,278.8 kg). It was grown by twins Ian and Stuart Paton in England and weighed on October 6, 2025. They named it “Muggle.” That’s roughly the weight of a small car, and it measured about 21 feet (6.5 m) around: it would take about five kids holding hands to circle it.
The previous record belonged to Travis Gienger, of Minnesota: 2,749 pounds (1,246.9 kg), in 2023.
What do people cook with pumpkin?
In the United States and Canada, pumpkin pie. The first cookbook written by an American, American Cookery, by Amelia Simmons (1796), already has two recipes for “pompkin” baked in a crust with eggs, spices and ginger. The pie became tied to Thanksgiving dinner thanks to the writer Sarah Josepha Hale, who in her novel Northwood (1827) gave it “the most distinguished niche” on the table and who later persuaded Abraham Lincoln to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, in 1863. In Canada it lands on the table earlier, for Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October.
You’ll sometimes hear that pumpkin pie was served at the first Thanksgiving, in 1621. No document shows it, and the story is told far more often than it can be proven.
In Mexico, almost everything. And each part of the plant has its recipe:
- **Calabaza en tacha**, candied pumpkin: pumpkin simmered in piloncillo (unrefined cane sugar) with cinnamon, which goes on the Day of the Dead altar. The holiday behind that altar is in why the Day of the Dead falls on November 1 and 2.
- Pipián: a mole made with pumpkin seeds.
- Squash blossoms: in quesadillas, soups, or stuffed. The smallest flowers are the most prized.
- Calabacitas: young squash stewed with corn, tomato and cheese, the whole milpa on one plate.
- Pepitas: pumpkin seeds toasted on a griddle, with salt and lime.
Something to do at home
Plant pumpkin seeds. Save a few raw seeds from the pumpkin you carve, let them dry for two days and plant three in a cup of soil, about three-quarters of an inch (2 cm) deep. Water lightly and put them somewhere sunny. In one or two weeks, two little round leaves appear. It’s a small-scale version of what someone did in Oaxaca ten thousand years ago.
Questions
Is a pumpkin a fruit or a vegetable? To a botanist it’s a fruit, because it holds the seeds. In the kitchen it’s used as a vegetable. Both answers are right, each in its own territory.
Are all Halloween pumpkins orange? The most common ones are, because they were bred that way. At farm stands you’ll find green, white, striped and speckled pumpkins, and all of them can be carved.
Can you eat a carving pumpkin? You can, although carving varieties have watery, less sweet flesh. For cooking, smaller “pie” or “sugar” pumpkins do much better.
Sources
- Bruce D. Smith, “The Initial Domestication of Cucurbita pepo in the Americas 10,000 Years Ago,” Science 276, 1997, pp. 932–934. doi:10.1126/science.276.5314.932
- Olga I. Sanjur, Dolores R. Piperno et al., “Phylogenetic relationships among domesticated and wild species of Cucurbita (Cucurbitaceae) inferred from a mitochondrial gene: Implications for crop plant evolution and areas of origin,” PNAS 99, 2002, pp. 535–540. doi:10.1073/pnas.012577299
- Dolores R. Piperno et al., “Starch grain and phytolith evidence for early ninth millennium B.P. maize from the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico,” PNAS 106, 2009, pp. 5019–5024. doi:10.1073/pnas.0812525106
- CONABIO, “Milpa” (in Spanish).
- Gran Diccionario Náhuatl, UNAM: ayotli.
- ASALE, Diccionario de americanismos: “zapallo” and “ayote”.
- Joan Corominas and José A. Pascual, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, s.v. “calabaza.”
- Online Etymology Dictionary, “pumpkin” and “squash”.
- Harry S. Paris et al., “First known image of Cucurbita in Europe, 1503–1508,” Annals of Botany 98, 2006, pp. 41–47. doi:10.1093/aob/mcl082
- Jules Janick and Harry S. Paris, “The cucurbit images (1515–1518) of the Villa Farnesina, Rome,” Annals of Botany 97, 2006, pp. 165–176. doi:10.1093/aob/mcj025
- FAO, FAOSTAT, production of “Pumpkins, squash and gourds,” 2024.
- R. W. Robinson, Squash and Pumpkin, report of the Cucurbit Crop Germplasm Committee, USDA-ARS, 1995.
- Jessica A. Savage et al., “The making of giant pumpkins,” Plant, Cell & Environment 38, 2015, pp. 1543–1554. doi:10.1111/pce.12502
- Guinness World Records, “Heaviest pumpkin”, accessed September 25, 2026.
- Larousse Cocina, Diccionario enciclopédico de la gastronomía mexicana: “Calabaza en dulce o en tacha” (in Spanish).
- Amelia Simmons, American Cookery, Hartford, 1796. Text on Project Gutenberg.
- Plimoth Patuxet Museums, “Sarah Josepha Hale”.
Written by the Idunn Editorial Team, with support from AI tools in the research and drafting.
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