1491 (72 page)

 

Hostility: Interviews, Crawford, Dillehay, Fiedel, Meltzer; Morrell 1990a:1.

 

Site visit to Monte Verde: Meltzer 1997; Adovasio and Page 2003:Chap. 9 (according to Meltzer, an accurate account [interview, Meltzer]); Gibbons 1997; Wilford 1997b (“ball game”). See also, Haynes 1999.

 

Fiedel’s critique: Author’s interviews, Fiedel; Fiedel 1999a (“virtually every,” 1); Pringle 1999. See also, in general, Haynes 2003.

 

Haynes’s misgivings: Haynes 1999 (“further testing”).

 

Corridor critics: Levson and Rutter 1996; Burns 1996; Catto 1996; Jackson, Phillips, and Little 1999.

 

Lack of evidence in corridor: Driver 2001.

 

Critique of overkill: Grayson and Meltzer 2003 (“lives on,” 590).

 

Clovis-firsters in minority: Roosevelt, Douglas, and Brown 2002 (“[T]he tide of public and scholarly opinion has definitely turned against Clovis as the earliest culture,” 159); Lynch 2001 (“Some of our,” 39; “blow the whistle,” “political correctness,” 41).

 

Three other pre-Clovis sites: Meadowcroft Rockshelter, in Pennsylvania, excavated mainly by James Adovasio; Cactus Hill, in Virginia, excavated by Joseph McAvoy; and Topper, in South Carolina, excavated by Allan Goodyear. See Adovasio and Page 2003.

 

Kennewick Man: Chatters 2001; Thomas 2001. The European connection links to Smithsonian archaeologist Dennis Stanford’s idea that the Clovis culture descended from the Solutrean culture in Pleistocene Era France and Spain. Because Solutrean spear points resemble Clovis points, Stanford has speculated that they wandered across a northern arch of ice from Ireland to Greenland to northeast Canada, in an Atlantic version of the passage through Beringia. Stanford’s Solutrean proposal was never published in scholarly journals, though it was adumbrated in
Newsweek
and the
New Yorker.
Specialists in Solutrean culture have not greeted these ideas with equal warmth (Stanford and Bradley 2002; Straus 2000; see also, Preston 1997; Begley and Murr 1999).

 

Baja skulls: González-José et al. 2003; Dillehay 2003.

 

Australians into Brazil: Mattos 1939:105–07.

 

Fladmark and coastal route: Fladmark 1979 (see references therein to earlier papers); Mason 1894 (early proposal); Easton 1992; Koppel 2003:68–74; Powledge 1999; Hall 1999.

 

“Even primitive”: Quoted in Chandler 2002.

 

(Re)settlement of Europe: Tolan-Smith 1998; Rozoy 1998. Before the Ice Age, northern Europe was populated, but there was no cultural continuity between the earlier and later inhabitants.

 

6 /
Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize

“weft-twining”: My thanks to Nobuko Kajitani and Masa Kinoshita for helping me with textile terminology.

 

Huaricanga dig: Author’s interviews, Haas, Creamer, Ruiz, Gerbert Asencios, Dan Corkill, Luis Huaman, Kit Nelson.

 

Discovery of Norte Chico: The ruins were first written up by Max Uhle (1856–1944), a German researcher who is often called the “father of South American archaeology” (Uhle 1925). For Uhle’s life and work, see Menzel 1977; Rowe 1954.

 

Among the world’s biggest buildings: Huaricanga was built before the Egyptian pyramids, at a time when the only other structures that could be called monumental were in the city-states of Sumer. But at the time even these were smaller than the Huaricanga pyramid, so far as archaeologists can tell. The other main Eurasian culture centers—the Indus Valley, the Nile Delta, and the Shang homeland in China—did not even have cities then. Later the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the pyramids of Egypt surpassed the Peruvian temples in size.

 

McNeill book: McNeill 1967.

 

High-school textbook: Stearns 1987 (“four initial centers,” 16; Indian history, 203–12). It was better than some other histories.
A World History,
by Mazour and People, gave the Americas just five pages (281–86). R. J. Unstead’s
History of the World
devoted three and a half pages to Indians: one and a half in the chapter “Other Cultures,” and two pages in the chapter “Europeans in America” (Unstead 1983:58–59, 200–02).

 

Maize as most important crop: The 2001 maize harvest was 609 million metric tons, whereas rice and wheat were 592 million mT and 582 million mT respectively. Statistics from the FAO agricultural database are online at http://apps.fao.org/default.htm.

 

Three-fifths of the crops: Weatherford 1988:204.

 

Olmec as founder of Peruvian societies: This idea was common in the 1920s and 1930s (Wells 1920 [vol. 2]:189–90). Later it fell out of favor, though it continued to be mooted until at least the 1960s (Coe 1962).

 

Sumer as world’s oldest city: Some densely populated settlements were older, notably Çatalhöyük, in central Turkey, and ’Ain Ghazal, in Jordan. But archaeologists believe that these were not true cities, because they show little evidence of public architecture, strong social hierarchy, and division of labor (Balter 1998; Simmons et al. 1988).

 

Eurasian trade in ideas: Examples lifted from Teresi 2002.

 

Pan-American Highway: The roadless gap in Panama and Colombia, once quite large, has shrunk to about fifty miles. Still, the road is so bad that the Lonely Planet guidebook describes the Pan-American Highway as “more of a concept than an actual route.”

 

Atacama as model for Mars: Navallo-González et al. 2003.

 

Pizarro’s pilot’s advice: Quoted in Thomson 2003:139.

 

Possible Paleo-Indian routes to coast: Arriaza 2001.

 

Two
Science
reports: Sandweiss et al. 1998; Keefer et al. 1998; deFrance et al. 2001. See also, Pringle 1998b; Wilford 1998a.

 

Different early adaptations: A fine summary is provided in Moseley 2001:91–100.

 

First finding of mummies: Max Uhle found the same mummies but didn’t further excavate there (Uhle 1917). I am grateful to the librarians at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú who hunted down this article for me.

 

Chinchorro diet: Aufderheide and Allison 1995. My thanks to Joshua D’Aluisio-Guerreri for helping me obtain this article.

 

Chinchorro mummies: Arriaza 1995 (1983 find, chap. 2); Allison 1985; Pringle 1998a.

 

Anemia in child mummies: Focacci and Chacón 1989.

 

Tapeworm eggs: Reinhard and Urban 2003.

 

Import of Norte Chico: Author’s Interviews, Haas, Creamer, Ruiz, Mike Moseley. Haas and Creamer 2004 (“The complex of sites,” 36); Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz, 2004.

 

Aspero: Willey and Corbett 1954 (“knolls,” 254); Moseley and Willey 1973 (“excellent, if embarrassing,” “temple-type,” 455); Feldman 1985; 1980:246 (rejecting older dates), cited in Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz, 2004.

 

Caral: Shady Solis, Haas, and Creamer 2001; Shady Solis and Leyva eds. 2003; Shady Solis, pers. comm. See also, Pringle 2001; Sandweiss and Moseley 2001; Fountain 2001; Bower 2001; Ross 2002.

 

Dating of other Norte Chico sites: Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz 2004.

 

Egypt: For dates and sizes I have relied on Algaze 1993 and Spence 2000 (which dates construction on the Great Pyramid of Khufu to begin in 2485–75
B.C.
).

 

Invention of government: Author’s interviews, Haas, Petersen; Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz 2004.

 

Cotton domestication: Sauer 1993.

 

Cotton in Europe and the Andes: Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):325–27; (vol. 2):178–80 (bans, prostitutes), 312–13; Murra 1964.

 

MFAC hypothesis: Moseley 2005, 1975b. See the critiques in Wilson 1981, Raymond 1981.

 

Work parties and music: Author’s Interviews, Haas, Creamer; Shady Solis 2003a, 2003b.

 

Champ de Mars: Schama 1989:504–09.

 

Early Staff God: Author’s interviews, Creamer; Makowski, pers. comm.; Haas and Creamer, forthcoming; Spotts 2003; Makowski 2005.

 

Norte Chico as foundation: In the past anthropologists have sometimes tried to describe Peruvian societies in terms of
lo Andino,
a being whose special characteristics have uniquely defined those societies throughout time. I am arguing something different, that people who have solved problems in one way will often return to those proven methods to solve new ones.

 

Domestication of tobacco: Winter 2000.

 

Itanoní description, plans, history: Author’s interviews, Ramírez Leyva.

 

Uniqueness of Itanoní: Small tortillerías using local maize persist in rural Mexico, although they are threatened by the industrial production of Maseca, the large, state-affiliated maize and tortilla firm. By contrast, Itanoní is a boutique operation that sells as many as eight different varieties of tortillas, each made from a separate local cultivar. The difference is akin to the difference between an Italian village café that sells liters of unlabeled local wine and an
enoteca,
a fine wine store featuring the carefully labeled production of the region.

 

Millet as first cereal: Callen 1967.

 

Genetic similarity of cereals: Gale and Devos 1998.

 

Productivity of wild cereals: Zohary 1972; Harlan and Zohary 1966.

 

Teosinte: Author’s interview, Wilkes; Wilkes 1972, 1967 (I am grateful to Dr. Wilkes for giving me copies of his work); Crosby 2003b:171 (nutritional value).

 

Wheat and barley nonshattering mutation: Zohary and Hopf 2000:29–30, 59–60; Hillman and Davies 1990.

 

General maize history: Warman 2003; Anon. 1982 (“not domesticated,” 5).

 

Paleo-Indian agricultural development and MacNeish’s work: MacNeish 1967, 1964; Flannery and Marcus 2002. MacNeish died in 2001.

 

Long debate over origin of maize: Kahn 1985:3–82; Galinat 1992.

 

Mangelsdorf theory: Mangelsdorf, MacNeish, and Galinat 1964. Mangelsdorf first proposed the extinct-wild-ancestor theory in Mangelsdorf and Reeves 1939. I am grateful to Dr. Wilkes for lending me a copy of this document. See also, Mangelsdorf 1986.

 

Beadle’s theory: Beadle 1939.

 

Caustic letters: E.g., the exchanges between Beadle and another Nobel-winning biologist, Barbara McClintock, in 1972 (McClintock Papers, “Searching for the Origins of Maize in South America, 1957–1981: Documents,” letters of 22 Jan.–24 Feb. 1972, available online at http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/LL/Views/Exhibit/documents/origins.html).

 

Iltis theory: Iltis 1983.

 

Teosinte-gamagrass theory and critiques: Eubanks 2001b (McClintock quotes, 509), 1997; Bennetzen et al. 2001.

 

Teosinte mutations: The development of three of these mutations is elucidated in Jaenicke-Després 2003. See references therein for the discoverers of the genes.

 

Maize in a decade: Eyre-Walker et al. 1998. Essentially the team argued that in ten years breeders with exactly the right teosinte variants could have created maize if they were as systematic as modern breeders. One assumes that the actual development time was longer.

 

Locus and timing of development of maize: MacNeish went back to his early maize cobs with new tools and decided they dated to about 3500
B.C.
(Farnsworth et al. 1985). Subsequently, researchers did the same for early maize cobs from nearby Oaxaca, pushing back the date to about 4200
B.C.
(Piperno and Flannery 2001; Benz 2001). Both of these sites contained fully domesticated maize (Benz and Iltis 1990). Pope et al. found teosinte pollen grains as early as 5100
B.C.
in a wet Gulf Coast site where teosinte is not native, suggesting that it was moved there from the highlands. By 4000
B.C.
the pollen is dominated by modern maize (Eubanks 2001a; MacNeish and Eubanks 2000; Pope et al. 2001).

 

“arguably man’s”: Federoff 2003.

 

Diversity of maize: Doebley, Goodman, and Stuber 1998. The reason for the diversity is that the ancestor species were hyperdiverse (Eyre-Walker et al. 1998).

 

Aragón Cuevas research: Author’s interviews, Aragón Cuevas. The number of landraces varies from study to study, because the term is not precisely defined. It is often claimed that more than two hundred exist in Latin America (e.g., Wellhausen et al. 1957, 1952).

 

Five thousand cultivars: Author’s interview, Wilkes. This is a widely cited guess by a distinguished researcher with long experience in the field.

 

Chamula statistics: Anon. ed. 1998a. The data are from 1991, the most recent year for which census results are available.

 

Perales’s study: Author’s interview, Perales.

 

Milpa:
Here I describe the Mesoamerican variant of an ideal.
Milpa
-style agriculture occurs in much of South America, though centered often on potatoes or manioc instead of maize. Even in Mesoamerica, plenty of actual
milpas
are nothing more than maize fields, especially where farmers grow maize for the market. Subsistence-farm
milpas
I have seen tend to be more diverse.
Milpa
cultivation is often described—incorrectly, according to Wilkes (author’s interview)—as synonymous with “slash-and-burn,” in which farmers clear small areas for short times and then let them go fallow (e.g., the otherwise useful Ewell and Sands 1987). Slash-and-burn, though, is generally a modern innovation (see chap. 9). A good description of the
milpa
is Wilken 1987. A classic early study is Cook 1921.

 

Green Revolution and
milpa:
Author’s interviews, Denevan, Hallberg, Perales, Wilkes (“most successful”), James Boyce; Mann 2004.

 

Abundance of wild wheat and barley: Harlan and Zohary 1966 (“square kilometers,” “Over many thousands,” 1078).

 

“the key”: Coe 1968:26.

 

Kirkby’s estimate: Kirkby 1973.

 

Maize iconography: Fields 1994.

 

Maize in Europe: Crosby 2003b:180–81; Warman 2003: 97–111.

 

Pellagra in Europe, Goethe: Roe 1973; McCollum 1957:302; Goethe 1962:33–34; Warman 2003:132–50.

 

Maize and slavery: Author’s interviews, Crosby; Crosby 2003b:186–88; 1994:24; Warman 2003:60–65.

 

Oaxaca data: Anon. ed. 1998b:532–68. The data are from 1991, the most recent year for which census results are available.

 

Estimated productivity of Green Revolution maize in Oaxaca: Author’s interviews, Aragon Cuevas, James Boyce. The estimate is roughly confirmed by the calculations of Ackerman et al. (2002:36) that “a 1 percent increase in use of improved varieties was typically associated with an increase in yield of 0.037 tons/ha” and hence a 100 percent switchover is a jump of 3.7 tons/ha.

 

Economic problems of landrace maize in Oaxaca: Author’s interviews, Aragón Cuevas, Bellon, Boyce, Hallberg, Ramírez Leyva, Wilkes.