Over the past few decades, a small group of archaeologists have turned up evidence that supports a different timeline, which begins much, much earlier. In the rolling fields of the Midwest, the breadbasket of the United States, maize-based agriculture took over only with Mississippian culture, which began just one short millennium ago. After all, corn took its sweet time fomenting that revolution-thousands of years to transform from scraggly specimens like the ones found in Oaxaca to full-on corn, thousands more to migrate up from Mesoamerica, and still more to adapt to the growing season at higher latitudes. This long-held narrative now seems to be incomplete, at best. From that third point of origin, corn is supposed to have converted naive, nomadic hunter-gatherers into rooted, enlightened farmers throughout the continent, all the way up into the northern plains. Childe’s work on what he termed “the Neolithic Revolution” focused on just one site of innovation in the Near East, the famous Fertile Crescent, but over time archaeologists posited similar epicenters in the Yangtze River valley of East Asia and in Mesoamerica. Gordon Childe declared in 1935, was an event akin to the Industrial Revolution-a discovery so disruptive that it spread like the shocks of an earthquake, transforming everything in its path. The development of agriculture, the Marxist archaeologist V. And that gap, the distance between these hardly-corns and the flush, fleshy ears that sustain nations, is where the old story of agriculture’s origins starts to break down. They, too, are not much to look at-skinny nubbins of plant, black and cragged with empty spaces where kernels once grew. These days, the cobs are usually stored in Mexico City’s fabulous Museo Nacional de Antropología, but the winter I visited they happened to be on display in Oaxaca’s cultural museum. Amid the remains of deer, rabbit, mud turtle, mesquite, pine nuts, squash, and prickly pear, Flannery and his crew found those four scant specimens of corn. The corn cave, which is no taller or roomier than a modest corner office, likely served as a storeroom or shelter for nomadic peoples, who left behind bones and plant detritus as far back as 10,000 years ago. Mostly they show off the ancient paintings, in vaulted caves with views that stretch for miles. Today, that cave is contained in a biological preserve where council members of the nearest town patrol the grounds and, from time to time, guide visitors up the ridge. And in one of those, he found some notably old corn cobs. Some nearby caves, too, have traces of ancient wall paintings-a jaguar, two stick figures, and la paloma, “the dove.” When, starting in 1964, the archaeologist Kent Flannery came to this valley looking for a place to dig, he examined more than 60 of these caves, tested 10 or so, and eventually focused his work on just two. Humans have been living in the valley of Oaxaca for ages now the main road passes a boomlet of mezcalerias, flat fields of corn, and an antique cliffside etching of a cactus. Sometimes a handful of seeds can help confirm a theory about the dawn of agriculture, or help unravel it. But sometimes a whole history is preserved by chance on a dry cave floor. In appearance, like many archaeological sites, it is unimpressive, a cave so shallow that even the designation “cave” is questionable. They were uncovered in Oaxaca, in 1966, and that site, cuna del maiz, the “cradle of corn,” is in concept a landmark of human advancement on Earth. The oldest known bits of recognizable corn, a set of four cobs each smaller than a pinky finger, are some thousands of years younger than that. The first ear of corn-although calling it corn might be a stretch-likely grew somewhere in the highlands of Central Mexico, as far back as 10,000 or so years ago. Superior men tamed nature and taught other superior men to follow. This very human innovation had unspooled in the same rare way in these two places. If the Middle East’s Fertile Crescent was agriculture’s origin point for Europe, Mexico was agriculture’s origin point here. When Europeans arrived, corn ruled the fields, a staple crop, just like wheat across the ocean. The more advanced people there began cultivating this knobbly little plant and passed their knowledge north, to people in more temperate climes. On this continent, agriculture-and therefore civilization-was born in Mesoamerica, where corn happened to be abundant. T he old, epic story of agriculture in North America had two heroes, long sung and much venerated. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |