if you recognize this succulent as an agave you might know it because of its role in this or more specifically this all tequila is made from one species of agave but agave expert wendy hodson thinks they're great i think's great for a legacy that predates margaritas i'm a botanist at the desert botanical garden in phoenix arizona but she agreed to take us out of phoenix almost there to the desert north of the city to see ancient agave gardens okay so it may not look like much but this is a site where hodson believes people were farming agaves maybe a thousand years ago these hills were probably covered with agaves the more water loving the more tender crops beans corn squash etc would be down in the lower parts see this guy this is what we call the sacred mountain agave it's found only in this area and it's another one that we believe we're cultivated by pre-columbian farmers as far back as possibly eight or 900 a.d and they're still alive they're believed to be cultivated because they're slightly different from the wild agaves found in the area the flowers are different they're sort of a greenish white it's well known that people in mexico have been cultivating agaves for centuries but it's the recent research of hudson and others that suggests people in the southwest relied on cultivated agaves as well you know you have the three sisters corn beans and squash agave needs to be right up there that's actually the great ant so how do you eat one of these you can see the young flowering stalk just starting to emerge and that was the time that you would want to harvest them because the plants accumulate in all these carbohydrates for the production of the flower stock it can take 10 to 15 years for an agave to flower so cultivating them would have taken some foresight and the flowering stock actually isn't the sweet part the edible part is down here they would cut off all the leaves and they would use these agave tools that we do find in the landscape they're sharpened rock tools agave knives like these are some of the strongest evidence that these agaves were cultivated and then you're left with this well it looks like a pineapple and it's the heart and that's what's baked pit baked for many years or two to four days this pit was dug recently for a festival but we do find agave pits in the landscape that date back into 800 900 and after days of roasting you have the most wonderful delicious sweet food there aren't a lot of super sweet foods around but the agave is hugely sweet so you can imagine how popular this plant is just for food in terms of food agaves were probably more of a supplemental rather than a staple crop experts say but the plants had other uses too fiber was huge agave sandals mats beverage of course they were making their mezcal or pulque very definitely i mean who wouldn't you know hudson says agave were not likely cultivated after about 1350 a.d since then these plants have been reproducing asexually so the new agaves are clones of the old ones meaning barring any weird little mutation you're we're looking at what they were growing way back then which is really a rare opportunity hudson hopes that these agaves may provide some insight into the cultures that were farming them it's kind of like finding an ancient piece of pottery except it's alive it's alive for science friday i'm flora lichtman