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Whether on the coast or in the river valleys, Moseley said, the Norte Chico lighted a cultural fire. During the next three thousand years, Peru hosted so many diverse cultures that the archaeological timelines in textbooks, with their multiple arrows and switchbacks, are as impenetrable as the family trees of European kings. Despite their variousness, Haas says, all seem to have drawn in their diverse ways from the well of Norte Chico. Characterizing the similarities is as difficult as nailing down a blob of mercury, because exceptions abound and human behavior is always multifaceted. Nonetheless, visitors to Andean history note certain ways of doing things that recur in ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one variant, sometimes in another, like the themes in a jazz improvisation. The primacy of exchange over a wide area, the penchant for collective, festive civic work projects, the high valuation of textiles and textile technology—Norte Chico, it seems possible to say, set the template for all of them.

And only Norte Chico. For the next four thousand years, Andean civilization was influenced by only one major import from the world outside: maize. A few other minor crops made the trip later, including tobacco, domesticated in Amazonia, then exported north to become the favorite vice of Indians from Mesoamerica to Maine. But it is a mark of maize’s social, cultural, and even political centrality that it was the first—and for centuries the only—phenomenon to pass from Mexico to the Andes. The next major import, alas, was smallpox.

TINY COBS

Although it was just after dawn, several people were already waiting outside the small store. When the metal grating rolled up, I followed them inside. The shop was in a middle-class neighborhood of Oaxaca city, in southern Mexico. Behind the low counter, half a dozen women hovered over waist-high stoves made of concrete block. Recessed into the dome-shaped top of each stove were two shallow clay dishes that served as burners. With expert motions the women slipped tortillas—thin discs of cream-colored flour perhaps nine inches in diameter—onto the hot burners. In seconds the tortilla dried and puffed up like a soufflé. And from the storefront floated the aroma of toasting maize, which has permeated Mexico and Central America for thousands of years.

Established in 2001, the tortilla store is an innovative attempt to preserve one of earth’s greatest cultural and biological assets: the many local varieties of maize in the narrow “waist” of southern Mexico. The isthmus is a medley of mountains, beaches, wet tropical forests, and dry savannas, and is the most ecologically diverse area in Mesoamerica. “Some parts of Oaxaca go up nine thousand feet,” T. Boone Hallberg, a botanist at the Oaxaca Institute of Technology, told me. “Other parts are at sea level. Sometimes the soil is very acid, sometimes it’s quite basic—all within a few hundred feet. You can go on either side of a highway, and the climate will be different on the east side than on the west side.” The area’s human geography is equally diverse: it is the home of more than a dozen major Indian groups, who have a long and fractious history. Despite the strife among them, all of them played a role in the region’s greatest achievement, the development of Mesoamerican agriculture, arguably the world’s most ecologically savvy form of farming, and of its centerpiece, Zea mays, the crop known to agronomists as maize.

I was visiting Amado Ramírez Leyva, the entrepreneur behind the tortilla store. Born in Oaxaca and trained as an agronomist, Ramírez Leyva had established a consortium of traditional farmers, Indians like himself (Ramírez Leyva is Ñudzahui [Mixtec], the second most numerous Indian group in the region). The farmers supply eight different varieties of dried maize to his shop, Itanoní, where the kernels are carefully ground, hand-pressed into tortillas, and cooked fresh for customers. Itanoní means “maize flower