What staple crops are most associated with the rise of Mesoamerican civilizations?

About 9,000 years ago in the Balsas River Valley of southwestern Mexico, hunter-gatherers began domesticating teosinte, a wild grass. Fast-forward to the present, and what was a humble perennial has been turned into the world’s biggest grain crop: maize.

Humanity deeply relies on maize, or corn, but just when it became a major food crop in the Americas has been a source of mystery and dispute.

Now, a UC Santa Barbara researcher and his collaborators, by testing the skeletons of an “unparalleled” collection of human skeletal remains in Belize, have demonstrated that maize had become a staple in the Americas 4,700 years ago.

In a new paper, “Early isotopic evidence for maize as a staple grain in the Americas” in the journal Science Advances, Douglas J. Kennett, a UCSB anthropology professor, details how the discovery of human skeletons buried in a rock-shelter over a period of 10,000 years opened a window on maize consumption nearly three millennia before the rise of Maya civilization.

"What this paper shows is that by 4,700 years ago,” Kennett said, “there is a significant shift towards maize cultivation and consumption, exceeding what we would consider to be a staple grain. And by 4,000 years ago maize was a persistently used staple and its importance continues through the Classic Maya period and until today.”

Kennett, the paper’s lead author, said the breakthrough came with the discovery of two rock-shelters with remarkably well-preserved skeletal remains in the Maya Mountains of Belize. Bones in the Neotropics typically degrade because of heat and humidity, but these rock shelters preserved the skeletal material well enough to measure stable isotopes revealing the diets of these people prior to death.

“The lowland Neotropics is not kind to organic material,” Kennett said. “Bones degrade quickly if left out in the open. But these are special sites because they provide dry shelter from the elements that helps preserve bones that we were able to extract collagen from for nitrogen and carbon isotope analysis.”

Maize synthesizes carbon using a distinctive photosynthetic pathway, which is evident isotopically in people that consume this important cultigen. There are very few plants in the lowland Neotropics that synthesize carbon in this way, so it’s clear isotopically when people start eating substantial amounts of maize.

Skeletons dated to older than 4,700 years ago show minimal or no maize consumption. Some individuals dated to 4,700 to 4,000 years ago, however, show about 30% of maize consumption — what Kennett calls a transitional period. By 4,000 years ago the carbon isotopic evidence indicates that maize consisted of more than 70% of the diet of individuals in the Maya lowlands.

“If you measured the isotopic composition of Maya people today,” he said, “they would look very similar because they’re consuming a great deal of maize on a daily basis. In terms of broader significance, this is the earliest evidence for the use of maize as a staple in the Americas that we’re aware of so far.”

The transition to agriculture in the Neotropics, as evidenced by the use of maize as a staple, has tantalizing implications for the rise of Maya civilization. As Kennett notes, where the Maya came from and when they moved into the area are still open questions. Classic Period Maya society didn’t start to develop until about 2,000 years ago.

“So the question is, when do Maya people first move into the region and are they the earliest agriculturalists?” he said. “It is possible that the early agriculturalists identified in our study moved into the area and that they are somehow related to the Maya that we associate with emergence of Maya civilization later in time.”

In addition to UC Santa Barbara, the study was conducted by researchers from the University of New Mexico, Penn State University, University of Exeter, Central Identification Laboratory, University of Mississippi, Northern Arizona University and the Ya’axche Conservation Trust in Belize.

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It is estimated that, in Mesoamerica, agriculture could have occurred 9,000 or 10,000 years ago, approximately. This area, which covers the southern half of Mexico and part of Central America, has been considered one of the most important centers of plant domestication in the world due to the coexistence of extraordinary plant diversity and a long cultural history (Casas & Caballero, 1995). The most relevant crop within the Mayan culture was and continues to be the maize (You might be interested to read A Place Called Mesoamerica). Its harvest was enough to feed the whole population and also could be cultivated in milpa, the system in which it is combined with other plants such as beans, squash, sweet potatoes, yuca and chili.

During the pre-Hispanic era, its importance in diet was such that it can be one specific factor that provided the transition from nomadic societies of hunter-gatherers to others of sedentary producers; in fact, from corn derived a large part of the economic, social and religious characteristics of the Mesoamerican peoples. Lynn V. Foster and Peter Mathews, in Handbook to Life in the Ancient Maya World, document how corn’s presence dominated the Maya landscape, their diets, and their beliefs, and held “the key to the development of more complex Mesoamerican society” Muller (2011).

The cultivation of corn was a key factor in health and success, as well as in relationships with surrounding tribes (Muller, 2011). The agricultural cycle was related to astronomy with the corn representing the central axis of its worldview. The link between the plant and humans led them to consider themselves as the men of corn, as well pointed out in the Popol Vuh (2015, pp 61)

Then our Makers Tepew and Q’uk’umatz began discussing the creation of our first mother and father. Their flesh was made of white and yellow corn. The arms and legs of the four men were made of corn meal. Then Grandmother Ixmunake ground the white and yellow ears of corn to make enough gruel to fill nine gourds to provide strength, muscle and power to the four new men.

Corn is present in religious ways, for offerings where they burn it with copal or copal pom, flowers, tobacco, alcohol, etc. In some ceremonies women drank Saka, which means corn mass and is a non-acoholic berverage made of cooked corn (mixtamal) (Gabriel, 2003). They offered Saka to their god Chaack before planting corn to protect it from wind, plagues and herbs, also asked for the rein to come for the growth of their crops (Márquez, 2006). Its importance is represented in the Mayan art too, like in the Cacaxtla mural in Tlaxcala, Mexico, where corn has human features such as eyes and a mouth (Muller, 2011).; in many archeological artifacts images of maize appears and in the Guatemalan textiles and costume. Maize, was also used for medical purposes, providing remedies against hepatitis, hypertension, diabetes, kidney problems, tumors, rheumatism, and other diseases (Álvaro, 2019)

Nowadays, corn is the most consumed basic grain for the Mayan people that plays an important role in the economy and the culture. In addition, corn is one of the plants with the highest plasticity to be cultivated in very diverse varieties of soils, heights above sea level and climates. In Guatemala, as well as in the Mesoamerican region, cultivation represents a long tradition of consumption, such as the home-made tortilla produced from the whole grain, that is the basis of food in most households, and other dishes like pozole, soaps and atoles. Torres (2008) describes that just in Mexico, have been identified at least 600 ways of preparing corn for food. ¿How many have you tried?

The plant is also used integrally for various purposes, some examples are: the use of the sweet sap of the stem as a substrate to make alcoholic beverages, the use of the modified leaves that cover the cob to wrap the tamales, and as raw material for the manufacture of handicrafts or fodder.

In fact, corn was an essential part of life in Mayan culture many years ago, and still is important in our traditions and its uses have been transformed and traveled the entire world.

For more information, visit our websites:
www.maya-ethnobotany.org
www.maya-ethnozoology.org
www.maya-archaeology.org

Blog prepared by Vivian Hurtado

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