By 7000 BCE a huge assortment of plants had come into being in the American rainforests that required little more than rudimentary tending to harvest. Among these were potatoes, peanuts, cacao, beans, manioc, squash, and avocados. Nowhere else in the world did such a wide variety of plants appear in such close geographical proximity. Milling stones appear along the southwest coast in Belize and in northeast Mexico, and by 3000 bce, hoes start to appear in Gulf Coast sites. In Oaxaca and Puebla we have the first indications of settlements and village life.1 The agricultural revolution had begun. If the people of the contemporaneous Mississippi culture had seemed affluent compared to their neighbors, even they would have been amazed had they traveled to Mexico and seen the tended garden fields.
It might seem counterintuitive that in a land where so many difierent foods were so easily available, these same people would master the production of corn, also called maize. Unlike wheat, barley, and rice, which in their edible forms are relatively similar to their wild forms, corn was the product of hundreds of years of genetic development. It seems that this took place in the area that straddles the El Salvador-Guatemala border where a wild grass known as teosinte grows. What attracted people to the plant is not known since it is inedible. Perhaps it was the discovery that the seeds could be “popped” when roasted. This might have had some ritualistic significance that focused growers on perfecting the plant and until it finally yielded corn in the modern sense. By 2500 bce, if not earlier, corn had come into its own. Back then, corn was much smaller than modern varieties, and still had hard kernels so could only be roasted or popped. But soon, certainly before 1000 bce, it was discovered that soaking the corn in lime or ash sofi:ened the kernels and allowed the pods to be made into corn meal. Once the soaking was finished, the grains were cooked and sometimes seasoned with meat, with the kernels expanding to more than double their original size. In South America this is commonly called mote. The process created significant nutritional advantages over untreated maize. It converts some of the niacin into a form more absorbable by the body, improves the availability of the amino acids, and supplements the calcium content. Naturally, this was not known to the American cooks, but over time the advantages were unmistakable.
Corn came in difierent types and sizes and was used in a variety of cuisines. One type was used for corn meal, another for roasting, another for hominy (a type of grits), and yet another for bread. For that, corn was grated from the cob and made into a milky mush, which was slowly baked until it became a type of cake. It could be combined with bean meal. Other types of corn were better dried than cooked, which was done in the sun or over a fire. Corn could also be used to make a fermented drink. For this a flinty variety of corn is needed, which is allowed to ripen and dry on the stalk. The kernels were put into a basket and wafi:ed in the open air until
Cleaned of chaff. It was then boiled and cooked until it became a whitish mass and placed into a wooden vessel and allowed to stand until fermented. It has a sweet pickle taste.
Though the rapid expansion of corn around 2000 bce marks the beginning of agriculture in Mexico and Central America, one has to differentiate between corn grown in a garden-plot manner and an organized agricultural commodity produced by large groups of farmers. This shift came with the Olmecs, who set in play the corn-centric worldview that would become the marker of civilization. It was also extraordinarily precarious. The rise and fall of those people who dedicated themselves to this plant was now almost predictable. It was a consequence of deforestation and soil depletion, not to mention pests.
At first corn was limited to Meso-America, then it spread to Peru and then into the Amazon and then up into North America, pushing away or transforming First Society customs in favor of its own. Unlike in Eurasia, where agriculture moved so rapidly that First Society people were either swallowed up or became invisible, in the Americas, the more limited expansion of agriculture meant that it never achieved a position of hegemony. Agriculturalists and non-agriculturalists shared the continent and common shamanistic worldviews—until the arrival of the Europeans.
World History
