The pistachio tree is native to regions of Central Asia, including present-day Iran and Afghanistan. Archaeology shows that pistachio seeds were a common food as early as 6750 BCE. The modern pistachio P. vera was first cultivated in Bronze Age Central Asia, where the earliest example is from Djarkutan, modern Uzbekistan.
Pistachio trees were introduced from Asia to Europe in the 1st Century AD by the Romans. They are cultivated across southern Europe and North Africa.
In the 19th century, the pistachio was cultivated commercially in parts of the English-speaking world, such as Australia along with New Mexico and California where it was introduced in 1854 as a garden tree. In 1904 and 1905, David Fairchild of the United States Department of Agriculture introduced hardier cultivars to California collected from China, but it was not promoted as a commercial crop until 1929. Walter T. Swingle’s pistachios from Syria had already fruited well at Niles, California, by 1917.
