• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1893 0

Yale archaeologist Michael D. Coe has written, “is the key…to the understanding of Mesoamerican civilization. Where it flourished, so did high culture.” The statement may be more precise than it seems. In the 1970s the geographer Anne Kirkby discovered that Indian farmers in Oaxaca considered it not worth their while to clear and plant a milpa unless it could produce more than about two hundred pounds of grain per acre. Using this figure, Kirkby went back to the ancient cobs excavated from Tehuacán Valley and tried to estimate how much grain per acre they would have yielded. The cob sizes steadily increased as they approached the present. In Kirkby’s calculation, the harvest broke the magic two-hundred-pound line sometime between 2000 and 1500 B.C. At about that time, the first evidence of large-scale land clearing for milpas appears in the archaeological record. And with it appeared the Olmec, Mesoamerica’s first great civilization.

Based on the Gulf Coast side of Mexico’s waist, on the other side of a range of low mountains from Oaxaca, the Olmec clearly understood the profound changes wreaked by maize—indeed, they fêted them in their art. Like the stained-glass windows in European cathedrals, the massive Olmec sculptures and bas-reliefs were meant both to dazzle and instruct. A major lesson is the central place of maize, usually represented by a vertical ear with two leaves falling to the side, a talismanic symbol reminiscent of a fleur-de-lys. In sculpture after sculpture, ears of maize spring like thoughts from the skulls of supernatural beings. Olmec portraits of living rulers were often engraved on stelae (long, flat stones mounted vertically in the ground and carved on the face with images and writing). In these stela portraits, the king’s clothes, chosen to represent his critical spiritual role in the society’s prosperity, generally included a headdress with an ear of maize emblazoned on the front like a star. So resonant was the symbol, according to Virginia M. Fields, curator of pre-Columbian art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, that in later Maya hieroglyphics “it became the semantic equivalent of the highest royal title, ahaw.” In the Maya creation story, the famous Popul Vuh, humans were literally created from maize.

Maize and the milpa slowly radiated throughout the Americas, stopping their advance only where the climate grew too cold or dry. By the time of the Pilgrims, fields of mixed maize, beans, and squash lined the New England coast and in many places extended for miles into the interior. To the south, maize reached to Peru and Chile. Maize was a high-status food there even though Andean cultures had developed their own agricultural system, with potatoes occupying the central role. (Amazonia seems to have been an exception; most but not all researchers believe maize there was eclipsed by manioc.)

Maize had an equivalent impact on much of the rest of the world after Columbus introduced it to Europe. Central Europeans became especially hooked on it; by the nineteenth century, maize was the daily bread of Serbia, Rumania, and Moldavia. So dependent did northern Italy and southwestern France become on polenta, a type of cornmeal mush, that pellagra (caused by eating too much maize) became widespread. “I know little, if anything, pleasing to say about the people,” wrote Goethe, who visited northern Italy in 1786. The women’s “features indicated misery, and the children were just as pitiful to behold; the men are little better…. The cause of this sickly condition is foundin the continued use of Turkish and heath corn.”

Even greater was the impact in Africa, where maize was transforming agriculture by the end of the sixteenth century. “The probability is that the population of Africa was greatly increased because of maize and other American Indian crops,” Alfred Crosby told me. “Those extra people helped make the slave trade possible.” (“Other American Indian crops” included peanuts and manioc, both now African staples.) Maize swept into Africa as introduced disease was leveling Indian societies.