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. Faced with a labor shortage, the Europeans turned their eyes to Africa. The continent’s quarrelsome societies helped them siphon off millions of people. The maize-fed population boom, Crosby believes, let the awful trade continue without pumping the well dry.
THE STUPIDEST QUESTION IN THE WORLD
A few days after I met Ramírez Leyva, the tortilla entrepreneur, we went to Soledad Aguablanca, a clump of small farms two hours southeast of Oaxaca City. Waiting for us at the side of the road was Héctor Díaz Castellano, one of the farmers who supplied Ramírez Leyva’s store. Díaz Castellano had a pencil moustache and a rakish straw hat. His Spanish was so heavily salted with Zapotec, the language of Oaxaca’s biggest Indian group, that I could not make out a word of it; Ramírez Leyva had to translate. The maize field was at the end of a long, rutted dirt road that led up a rise. Although we had left just after dawn, the sun was hot enough by our arrival to make me wish for a hat. Díaz Castellano walked along the rows, his gaze taking in every stalk as he passed. For an hour he spoke, almost without stopping, about his maize and the market for his maize. He was not, I suspected, a naturally loquacious man, but that morning he had a subject that interested him.
Héctor Díaz Castellano
Díaz Castellano’s maize field was one of the 340,000 farms in Oaxaca. His farm, like about two-thirds of the farms in the state, occupied less than ten acres—unviably small by the standards of developed nations. Most landrace maize is grown on these farms, partly because of tradition and partly because they are usually in areas that are too high, dry, steep, or exhausted to support high-yield varieties (or owned by farmers too poor to afford the necessary fertilizer). As if being grown on tiny farms in bad conditions weren’t enough, landrace maize is usually less productive than modern hybrids; a typical yield is .4 to .8 tons per acre, whereas Green Revolution varieties in Oaxaca reap between 1.2 and 2.5 tons per acre when properly fertilized, a crippling advantage. The meager harvests may be enough for subsistence but can rarely be brought to market because farm villages are often hours away on dirt roads from the nearest large town. But even when farmers try, it is often little use: modern hybrids are so productive that despite the distances involved U.S. corporations can sell maize for less in Oaxaca than can Díaz Castellano. Landrace maize, he said, tastes better, but it is hard to find a way to make the quality pay off. He was lucky, he said, that Ramírez Leyva was trying to market his crop.
We went to Díaz Castellano’s house for breakfast. His wife, Angelina, round and short-haired in a tight plaid dress, was cooking tortillas in an outdoor shed with corrugated aluminum walls. A wood fire burned beneath a concave clay griddle called a comal. The comal was propped above the flames on three rocks—a cooking method as old as Mesoamerican culture. By the fire, in a three-legged stone bowl, was a lump of fresh masa twice the size of a toaster. The stereotype is that rural Mexicans are generous to strangers. Piling my plate high, Angelina did nothing to dispel this impression.
I asked her husband what he was. I had wanted to find out which Indian group he was born into, but he took the question another way.
“Somos hombres de maíz,” he said, enunciating clearly for my benefit. We are men of maize.
I wasn’t sure what to make of this gnomic utterance. Was he pulling my leg?
“Everybody says that,” Ramírez Leyva said, observing my confusion. “It’s an idiom.” A little while later I visited a Danish anthropologist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), outside Mexico City. Watching films of her interviews with Oaxacans, I saw two old women explain to the young anthropologist that they, too, were hombres de maíz. So Ramírez Leyva was right, I thought. A day later a CIMMYT biologist gave me a paperback book, describing it as “the best novel ever written about Mesoamerica.” It was Hombres de maíz, by Miguel Angel Asturias. All right already, I thought. I get it.
Meanwhile Angelina had come out from behind the comal and joined her husband. In the Oaxacan countryside, they explained to me, a house without maize growing in the backyard is like a house without a roof or walls. You would never not have maize, they said. They were speaking matter-of-factly, as if telling me how to take the bus. Even in the city, they said, where people cannot grow maize, nobody would even think of passing a day without eating it.
Curious, I asked what they thought would happen if they didn’t have maize every day. Díaz Castellano looked at me as if I had asked the stupidest question in the world.
“Why should I want to be somebody else?” he said.
Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades
(Tales of Two Civilizations, Part II)
“LIKE GRAPES THEY FALL OFF”
On January 16, 1939, Matthew W. Stirling took an early-morning walk through the wet, buggy forest of Veracruz state, on the Gulf Coast side of Mexico’s southern isthmus. Eighty years before his walk, a villager traipsing through the same woods had stumbled across a buried, six-foot-tall stone sculpture of a human head. Although the find was of obvious archaeological importance, the object was so big and heavy that in the intervening eight decades it had never been pulled out of the ground. Stirling, director of the Smithsonian Bureau of American Ethnology, had gone to Mexico the year before, in early 1938, to see the head for himself. He found it, sunk to the eyebrows in mud, after an eight-hour horseback ride from the nearest town. The head was in the midst of about fifty large, artificial earthen mounds—the ruins, Sterling concluded with excitement, of a previously unknown Maya civic center. He had decided to assemble a research team and explore the area in more detail the next year, and persuaded the National Geographic Society to foot the bill. When he returned to Veracruz, he and his team cleared the dirt around the great head, admiring its fine, naturalistic workmanship, so unlike the stiff, stylized sculpture common elsewhere in Mesoamerica. Nearby, they found a stela, its wide, flat face covered with bas-relief figures. Hoping to turn up others, Stirling was walking that January morning to the far end of the mounded area, where a workman had noticed a large, flat, partly submerged rock: a second stela.
Accompanying him were twelve workers from the nearby hamlet of Tres Zapotes. They pried the stela from the ground with wooden poles, but it was blank. Disappointed, Stirling took the crew to yet a third fallen stela. They scraped away the covering dirt and found that it, like
the first, was covered with intricate images. Alas, the carvings were now too weathered to be deciphered. The frustrated Stirling asked the workers to expose the back of the slab by digging beneath it and levering up the stone with poles. Several of the men, he later recounted, “were on their knees in the excavation, cleaning the mud from the stone with their hands, when one of them spoke up in Spanish: ‘Chief! Here are numbers!’”
Across the back of the stela were clumps of dots and bars, a notation familiar to Stirling from the Maya. The Maya used a dot to signify one and a horizontal bar to signify five; the number nineteen would thus be three bars and four dots. Stirling copied the dots and bars and “hurried back to camp, where we settled down to decipher them.” The inscription turned out to be a date: September 3, 32 B.C, in today’s calendar.
Stirling already knew that Tres Zapotes was anomalous—it was at least 150 miles west of any previously discovered Maya settlement. The date deepened the puzzle. If, as seemed likely, it recorded when the stela was put on display, this implied that Tres Zapotes had been a going concern in 32 B.C.—centuries before any other known Maya site. The date thus seemed to imply that the Maya had originated well to the west of what was thought of as their traditional homeland, and much earlier than had been thought. Stirling didn’t believe it. Surely the Maya had not sprung up in Tres Zapotes and then moved en masse hundreds of miles to the east. But the alternative explanation—that Tres Zapotes was not a Maya community—seemed equally improbable. The Maya were universally regarded as the oldest advanced society in Mesoamerica. Whoever had carved the stela had some knowledge of writing and mathematics. If they were not Maya, the implication was that someone else had launched the project of civilization in Mesoamerica.
Learning from local people that Tres Zapotes was only one of many mound sites in Veracruz, Stirling decided to return in 1940 to survey them all. The task was daunting even for a cigar-chomping, whisky-drinking, adventure addict like Stirling. Most of the mound centers were in the middle of trackless mangrove swamps or up narrow, unmapped rivers choked with water hyacinth. Ticks and mosquitoes were indefatigable and present in huge numbers; the ticks were worse than the mosquitoes, Stirling remarked, because they had to be dug out of the flesh with a knife. At one point Stirling and a colleague hitched a ride in a pepper truck to one of the smaller sites. After jolting down a road with deep ruts “designed to test the very souls of motorcars,” the two men were let off in a nondescript meadow. Stirling went to talk with the driver.
“The ticks are not bad, are they?” I asked him hopefully, viewing the tall grass and underbrush between the road and the mounds. “No,” said the driver, beaming. “When full, like grapes they fall off and no harm is done. There are millions of them here, however.”
In La Venta, a dry, raised “island” in the coastal swamp, Stirling’s team discovered four more colossal heads. Like the first, they had no necks or bodies and wore helmets that vaguely resembled athletic gear. All were at least six feet tall and fifteen feet round and made from single blocks of volcanic basalt. How, Stirling wondered, had their makers transported these ten-ton blocks from the mountains and across the swamp? Whoever these people were, he eventually concluded, they could not be Maya; their ways of life seemed too different. Instead they must have belonged to another culture altogether. La Venta was filled with mounds and terraces, which told Stirling that many people had lived there. The city, he wrote in 1940, “may well be the basic civilization out of which developed such high art centers as those of the Maya, Zapotecs, Toltecs, and Totonacs.” He called its “mysterious people” the Olmec.
Stirling’s account set the template for decades to follow. Ever since his day, the Olmec have been known by two Homeric epithets: they were “mysterious,” and they were the “mother culture” of Mesoamerica. (Tourists are told by Frommer’s 2005 Mexico guide, for example, to visit the ruins of the “enigmatic people” who created the “mother culture of Mesoamerica.”) But in recent years many archaeologists have come to believe that neither description is correct.
Curious villagers surround the great Olmec head excavated in 1939 by archaeologist Matthew Stirling in the Mexican state of Veracruz.
The Olmec’s purported mysteriousness is related to their emergence. To Stirling and many of his successors, the Olmec seemed to have no peers or ancestors; they appeared fully formed, apparently from nowhere, like Athena springing from the brow of Zeus. First there was a jungle with a few indistinguishable villages; then, suddenly, a sophisticated empire with monumental architecture, carved stelae, earthwork pyramids, hieroglyphic writing, ball courts, and fine artworks—all of it conjured into existence with the suddenness of amagician’s trick. The Olmec, wrote Smithsonian archaeologist Betty Meggers, were a “quantum change.” Their status as precursors led archaeologists to believe that the subsequent emergence of other complex societies was due to their example—or their conquest. Even the mighty Maya did little more than continue down the path set by the Olmec. “There is now little doubt,” Yale archaeologist Michael Coe wrote in 1994, “that all later civilizations in Mesoamerica, whether Mexican or Maya, ultimately rest on an Olmec base.”
Strictly speaking, Coe was mistaken. By the time he wrote, many of his colleagues strongly doubted that the Olmec either emerged alone or were the mother culture. They did emerge abruptly, these researchers say, but they were only the first of the half-dozen complex societies—“sister cultures”—that sprang up in southern Mexico after the development of maize agriculture. Focusing on the Olmec’s chronological primacy, they believe, obscures the more important fact that Mesoamerica was the home of a remarkable multisociety ferment of social, aesthetic, and technical innovation.
RUBBER PEOPLE
Nobody knows the right name for the Olmec, but “Olmec” is the wrong one. They spoke a language in the Mixe-Zoquean language family, some members of which are still used in isolated pockets of southern Mexico. “Olmec,” though, is a word in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica to the north. It means, more or less, “people of the land of rubber.” The problem with the name is not so much that the Olmec did not use it for themselves—nobody knows what that name was, and they have to be called something. Nor is the problem the rubber, which the Olmec used, and may have invented (scientists discovered in the 1990s that they made rubber by chemically treating the latex-containing sap of a tropical tree, Castilla elastica). The problem is that the Mexica did not actually use the name to refer to the putative mother culture in Veracruz, but to another, completely unrelated culture in Puebla to the west, a culture that, unlike the ancient Olmec, still existed at the time of the Spanish conquest. The confusion between the Mexica’s Olmec and Stirling’s Olmec led some archaeologists to propose that the latter should be called the “La Venta Culture,” after the site he investigated. Almost everyone agreed that the new name was a big improvement, logically speaking. Unfortunately, nobody used it. Not for the first time in Native American history, the confusing, incorrect name prevailed.
The Olmec heartland was the coastal forests of Veracruz. Compared to the Norte Chico, the area is promising. Like the Peruvian littoral, it is bracketed by sea and mountains, but it catches, rather than misses, the prevailing winds, and the rain that comes with them. The shoreline itself is swampy, but not far from the coast the country rises into a lush, fertile plateau. Further inland are the Tuxtla Mountains, with many rivers cascading down their flanks. The rivers flood in the rainy season, enriching the land, Nile Delta style. During the rest of the year, the climate is drier, and farmers plant and tend their milpas on the alluvial soil.
The first traces of the people who would become the Olmec date back to about 1800 B.C. At that time there was little to distinguish them from groups elsewhere in Mesoamerica. But something happened in Veracruz, some spark or incitement, a cultural quickening, because within the next three centuries the Olmec had built and occupied San Lorenzo, the first large-scale settlement in North America—it covered 2.7 square miles. On a
plateau commanding the Coatzacoalcos river basin, San Lorenzo proper was inhabited mainly by the elite; everyone else lived in the farm villages around it. The ceremonial center of the city—a series of courtyards and low mounds, the latter probably topped with thatch houses—sat on a raised platform 150 feet high and two-thirds of a mile to a side. The platform was built of almost three million cubic yards of rock, much of it transported from mountain quarries fifty miles away.
Scattered around the San Lorenzo platform were stone monuments: massive thrones for living kings, huge stone heads for dead ones. Rulers helped to mediate between supernatural forces in the air above and the watery place below where souls went after life. When kings died, their thrones were sometimes transformed into memorials for their occupants: the colossal heads. The features of these enormous portraits are naturalistically carved and amazingly expressive—thoughtful or fiercely proud, mirthful or dismayed. It is assumed they were placed like so many stone sentinels for maximum Orwellian impact: the king is here, the king is watching you.*20
Like the carvings and stained-glass windows in European cathedrals, the art in San Lorenzo and other Olmec cities consisted mainly of powerful, recurring images—the crucifixions and virgins, so to speak, of ancient Mesoamerica. Among these repeated subjects is a crouched, blobby figure with a monstrously swollen head. Puzzled researchers long described these sculptures as “dwarves” or “dancers.” In 1997 an archaeologist and a medical doctor with archaeological leanings identified them as human fetuses. Their features were portrayed accurately enough to identify their stage of development. Researchers had not recognized them because artistic renditions of fetuses are almost unheard of in European cultures (the first known drawing of one is by Leonardo). Other frequent themes included lepers, the pathologically obese, and people with thyroid deficiencies, all portrayed with a cool eye for anatomical detail. Perhaps the best-known subject is a man or boy gingerly holding a “were-jaguar”: a limp, fat, sexless baby with a flattened nose and a snarling jaguar mouth. Often the baby has a deeply cloven skull.
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