Histories of Maize in Mesoamerica

Multidisciplinary Approaches

John Staller, Robert Tykot, Bruce Benz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315427270
• Subtopic: Botany
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume reprints 20 chapters from the editors' comprehensive Histories of Maize (2006) that are relevant to Mesoamerican specialists and students. New findings and interpretations from the past three years have been included. Histories of Maize is the most comprehensive reference source on the botanical, genetic, archaeological, and anthropological aspects of ancient maize published. Included in this abridged volume are new introductory and concluding chapters and updated material on isotopic research. State of the art research on maize chronology, molecular biology, and stable carbon isotope research on ancient human diets have provided additional lines of evidence on the changing role of maize through time and space and its spread throughout the Americas. The multidisciplinary evidence from the social and biological sciences presented in this volume have generated a much more complex picture of the economic, political, and religious significance of maize.

PART I

Histories of Maize:

Genetic, Morphological, and Microbotanical Evidence

CHAPTER

1

Differing Approaches and Perceptions in the Study of New and Old World Crops

TERENCE A. BROWN

Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

Introduction

Different Emphases in New and Old World Agriculture

Different Perceptions of the Role of Science

Glossary

Amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) A type of DNA sequence variation revealed by the polymerase chain reaction.

Ancient DNA DNA preserved in ancient biological material.

Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition A term used here to describe the period of Old World prehistory associated with a broad package of social and cultural changes that included adoption of agriculture in Southwest Asia.

Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups Groups of related DNA sequences that indicate the genetic structure of human populations.

Old World agriculture Used here to mean the agricultural system based on wheat, barley, and other crops that originated in the Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia approximately 10,000 years ago.

Postprocessualism A form of interpretative archaeology, which, among other things, rejects a positivist view of science.

Predomestication cultivation A period during which the progenitors of a crop are managed as a distinct population that is not completely isolated, in a reproductive sense, from wild members of the species.

Wave of advance A hypothesis that suggests agricultural spread into Europe was driven by large-scale migration of farmers in a southwest to northwest direction across the continent.

The great advances that have occurred in recent years in understanding the origins, spread, evolution, and uses of maize have paralleled similar advances with the principal crops of Old World agriculture, namely wheat and barley. Although there has been extensive transfer of ideas and results, the two research communities have developed their work with some independence, leading to an interesting, and possibly informative, divergence in scientific approaches and perceptions. For example, work on the spread of maize cultivation has always been informed by a clear perception that the factors responsible for adoption of agriculture at a particular site are complex and multifaceted, and hence the factors operating at one site may be different to those at another site. In contrast, ideas regarding wheat and barley cultivation have developed within the context of the competing wave of advance and acculturation models for agricultural spread, as described by human geneticists. These models, with their emphasis on cross-continental events, tended to draw attention away from the different effects of local factors, which subsequently have received relatively little attention in Europe. This chapter explores the differing approaches and perceptions in the study of New and Old World crops and attempts to identify areas where greater cross-fertilization of ideas may be beneficial to the two research communities.

INTRODUCTION

To an archaeologist, one of the most intriguing features of the development of agriculture is the way in which this process occurred independently and concurrently in different parts of the New and Old Worlds. To the casual observer, an equally intriguing example of independence and concurrence is provided by the way in which the archaeological study of agriculture has developed on the two sides of the Atlantic. The point is reflected by this book: of the 48 chapters presented on the prehistory, biogeography, domestication, and evolution of maize, only 2 come from groups located in countries outside of the Americas. One might suggest that a volume initially based on a symposium held at the Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archeology (SAA) might inevitably contain contributions that come predominantly from American archaeologists, but the geographical spread of the contributors to this volume does in fact give an accurate indication of where the vital research into the history of maize is being carried out. It is difficult to provide comparable data on the geographical spread of archaeologists working on the Old World crops, such as wheat and barley, because no equivalent symposium on the prehistory of these crops has been held in recent years. If such a symposium were held, then there would probably be a greater mixing of archaeologists from the New and Old Worlds, but a substantial majority of the contributors would be from Europe. And, although there would be notable exceptions, it is perhaps doubtful if many of the speakers or members of the audience from the SAA symposium on maize would speak at or attend a symposium on wheat and barley. Of course, it is not necessary for archaeologists to meet at conferences to exchange ideas, and there has always been an extensive intellectual interchange among groups working on the New and Old World crops, both through direct contacts and indirectly via the electronic and print media. Nonetheless, the degree of independence with which work on these two agricultural systems has developed has led to interesting, and possibly informative, divergences in approaches and perceptions. In this chapter, I attempt to draw out these divergences and (from a European perspective) to identify areas where cross-fertilization of ideas may be beneficial to the two research communities.

DIFFERENT EMPHASES IN NEW AND OLD WORLD AGRICULTURE

The SAA symposium on “The Stories of Maize,” on which this book is based, is an interesting point from which to begin a consideration of the contrasts between the American and European approaches to prehistoric agriculture. The symposium organizers attempted, with considerable success, to draw together researchers addressing different aspects of maize, including its origins, spread, and evolution, the different roles and uses of the crop, and the plant’s social and symbolic significance. In combination, the presentations covered a huge range of research strategies, encompassing scientific techniques such as DNA, phytolith, and isotope analyses, archaeobotanical and biogeographical approaches, and ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and linguistic studies. The symposium ran for 4 sessions held over 2 full days of the SAA meeting, with papers presented by 46 regular speakers and 8 discussants. The audience—which numbered more than 200 at times—was mixed, and this was certainly not one of those symposia where the speakers speak mainly to themselves. In short, the symposium formed a central and important part of the SAA meeting as a whole.

If a large symposium devoted to the archaeology of maize can be so successful and so well received at the major American archaeology conference, then why has there been no recent symposium devoted to the archaeology of wheat or barley at a major European conference? Or, to phrase the question differently, why should maize be considered a central research topic in the archaeology of the New World whereas wheat and barley are looked on as a specialist’s subject within European archaeology? I believe that the answer lies in a fundamental difference in emphasis in the way in which agriculture is studied in the New and Old Worlds. In the Americas, it is clear from the nature and success of the SAA symposium that the approach taken to the study of agricultural origins and development places major emphasis on the crops themselves. In Europe there is equal recognition of the central role agriculture played by the Southwest Asian crop assemblage—principally wheat and barley, but also comprising lentils, peas, flax, bitter vetch, and chickpea [34]—but the difference is that the origin and spread of agriculture is rarely looked on as an event in itself [33]. Instead, the adoption of agriculture is placed within a broader social context, originally called the “Neolithic Revolution” by V. Gordon Childe [7], but now more generally referred to as the “Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition.” Agriculture, therefore, becomes just one of a package of changes, including pottery and ground stone tools, that together constitute a significant step in human cultural evolution [32]. This explains why a proposal for a symposium on “The Histories of Wheat” would probably receive short shrift from the organizers of a major European archaeology conference and would not attract a particularly large audience. On the other hand, symposia on The Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition are frequently held, and although these adopt a broad approach, they inevitably include contributions from plant biologists in general and cereal geneticists in particular.

Reasons for the Difference in Emphasis

Whether the notion of the Neolithic Revolution is reasonable as an interpretation of and means of studying the origins of agriculture in the Old World, and whether or not agriculture in the New World was part of a similarly broad and far-reaching set of social and cultural changes, are interesting questions, but not the ones I am raising here. The point I wish to explore is why there should be such a striking difference in emphasis in the New and Old Worlds.

There are almost certainly a number of underlying causes to the differences in emphasis apparent today. One particularly fascinating question is the extent that notions regarding the singularity, or otherwise, of the invention of agriculture have played a role in the development of research into maize and wheat cultivation. In the New World, the natural distribution of teosinte in Mexico and Central America places a geographical limitation on the region where maize agriculture might have originated [23], but the initial interpretation, based on the substantial morphological and genetic variation displayed by modern maize, was that the crop was domesticated on multiple occasions [10, 18]. The alternative possibility, that maize has a single origin, has only really had strong supporting evidence since the publication in 2002 of analyses of microsatellite variation in maize cultivars and in wild teosinte populations; phylogeographical analysis of these data indicate that maize is monophyletic and arose from a single domestication in southern Mexico about 9000 years ago [20]. The study of maize archaeology has, therefore, developed with an open picture of the origins of the crop and hence without any strong basis for placing those origins within the social and cultural context of communities living in the region at the appropriate time. In contrast, for more than a decade, the prevailing view, based on various forms of genetic evidence, has been that the Old World crops were each domesticated once [34], a view that appeared to be confirmed in the later 1990s by examination of large amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) datasets for wheat and barley [3, 14, 22]. Further, the distributions of the wild progenitors of the Old World crops indicated that their site(s) of domestication must fall within Southwest Asia, one of the regions of the world that has been subjected to the most intense archaeological survey. It is not surprising that the presumed singularity of agricultural origins was, therefore, linked with prevailing archaeological thought on the development of culture and technology in Southwest Asia. Once this connection had been made it was, perhaps, inevitable that Old World agriculture would become looked on, conceptually, as part of a broader social transition, and that the inherent importance of this transition would become linked, at least in the mind of the layman, to the guns, germs, and steel of the modern day [8]. In the New World, studies of agriculture have developed without such distractions.

Interestingly, the notion of a single origin for maize has become prevalent just at the time that Old World researchers are beginning to reject the emphasis previously placed on single versus multiple origins as overly simplistic. This leads on from recognition that a single, geographically localized domestication for any Old World crop is inconsistent with the gradual transition from gathering to cultivation to domestication that is apparent in the archaeological record. In this regard, it has ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Histories of Maize in Mesoamerica
• PART I Histories of Maize: Genetic, Morphological, and Microbotanical Evidence
• PART II Histories of Maize: Domestication and Production
• PART III Histories of Maize: Isotope Analysis and Human Diet in Ancient Mesoamerica
• PART IV Histories of Maize: The Language of Maize in Mesoamerica
• Conclusion: The Antiquity, Biogeography and Culture History of Maize in Mesoamerica
• Index