by Dave Dewitt
Artist’s rendering of the outdoor kitchen at Cerén.
The remains of the original structure at Joya de Cerén, burled by volcano eruption around AD 600 (El Salvador). Photograph by Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz. Wikimedla. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Dr. Sheets and his students returned for five field sessions at Cerén, most recently in 1996. Their discoveries are detailed on their web site http://ceren.colorado.edu. Dr. Sheets describes one of their most interesting discoveries: “We had no idea that people in the region lived so well 14 centuries ago.”
The ash preserved the crops in the field, leaving impressions of the plants. The plants then rotted away, leaving perfect cavities, or molds. Using techniques that were developed at Pompeii, the archaeologists poured liquid plaster into the cavities. By removing the ash, the ancient fields were revealed and could be studied. Interestingly, the Native Americans of Cerén used row-and-furrow techniques similar to those still utilized today; corn was grown in elevated rows, and beans and squash were grown in the furrows in between. In a courtyard of a building, “we even found a series of four mature chile plants with stem diameters over 5 centimeters (2 inches),” writes Dr. Sheets. “They must have been many years old.” Chile peppers are rarely found in archaeological sites in Mesoamerica, so imagine the surprise of the researchers when they discovered painted ceramic storage vessels that contained large quantities of chile seeds. “One vessel had cacao seeds in the bottom, and chiles above, separated by a layer of cotton gauze,” Dr. Sheets reveals. “It is possible that they would have been prepared into a kind of mole sauce.” Also found were corn kernels, beans, squash seeds, cotton seeds, and evidence of manioc plants and small agave plants, which were used for their fiber to make rope rather than being fermented for an alcoholic beverage, pulque, as was done in Mexico.
I e-mailed Dr. Sheets, hoping to discover the shape and size of the chiles and thus deduce the variety being grown. But no whole pods were found, just the seeds and some pod fragments. The size of the chile stem indicated that the plant had been grown as a perennial, but all chile plants are perennial in tropical climates and can grow to a considerable size.
Dr. Sheets wrote me back about an article by Dr. David Lentz, the botanist who had studied the plant remains, and I tracked it down in the journal Latin American Antiquity, which I found in the Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Lentz writes about the seeds and the pod fragments: “It appears that many of these fell from the rafters of buildings where they would have been hung for drying or storage.” He adds that the chile seeds from the site were the first in Central America found outside Mexico, and he speculates that those seeds in vessels were probably being saved for future planting.
IDENTIFYING THE CERÉN CHILE
But what kind of chile was grown in Cerén? There was an intriguing clue in the article: a photograph of a chile seed compared with a bar indicating the length of 1 millimeter. The seed was 3.5 millimeters wide. Since the size of the seed is directly related to the size of the pod (generally speaking, the larger the pod, the larger the seed), perhaps it was possible to guess the size of the pod by comparing that ancient seed to seeds I had stored in my greenhouse.
Scientists, including researcher Linda Perry, writing in the journal Science (February 16, 2007), have proven that chile peppers were domesticated in South America at least by 6,000 years ago. Although very few prehistoric pods and pollen have been found in archaeological sites, a new technique has been developed to track and date the earliest uses of chiles. “We found that a widespread, but previously unidentified starch morphotype,” writes Perry, “is derived from chile pepper fruits and is commonly preserved on artifacts.” This microfossil was documented in seven archaeological sites ranging from the Bahamas to the Andes.
The starches were recovered from sediment samples, milling stones, and food residues from cooking vessels. The oldest positively identified starches were found at the sites of Loma Alta and Real Alta in southwestern Ecuador, and were dated at 6,000 years before the present (BP). Also found was evidence of maize (corn), squash, beans, and palms. But since Ecuador is not considered to be the center of domestication for any of the five domesticated species, “the presence of domesticated chiles within this early complex agricultural system indicates that these plants must have been domesticated elsewhere earlier than 6,000 years B. P. and brought into the region from either the north or the south.”
The scientists noted that none of the microfossils contained starches typical of the wild species of Capsicum, so all of the chiles were grown by the Amerindians living at the sites. “The presence of domesticated plants used as condiments rather than as staple foods during the preceramic period indicates that sophisticated agriculture and complex cuisines arose early throughout the Americas and that the exploitation of maize, root crops, and chile peppers spread before the introduction of pottery,” Perry notes. She adds: “Evidence from both macrobotanical and microbotanical remains indicates that once chile peppers became incorporated into the diet, they persisted.” In addition to chile peppers, maize was also present at all seven sites. “Maize and chiles occur together from the onset of this record until European contact,” she concludes, “and, thus, represent an ancient Neotropical plant food complex.”
Because chiles cross-pollinate, hundreds of varieties of the five domesticated chile species were developed by humans over thousands of years in South and Central America. The color, size, and shape of the pods of these domesticated forms varied enormously. Ripe fruits could be red, orange, brown, yellow, or white. Their shapes could be round, conic, elongate, oblate, or bell-like, and their size could vary from the tiny fruits of chiltepíns or Tabascos to the large pods of the anchos and pasillas. But very little archaeological evidence existed to support these theories until the finds at Cerén.
AN EDUCATED GUESS
It was exciting to think that perhaps I had a window into the ancient chile domestication process. Because their seeds were collected, and the plants were growing in a courtyard, the chile plants at Cerén were obviously cultivated and were more than just “tolerated weeds.” It was time to break out my metric ruler and start measuring seeds. I came up with the following table, ranked by seed width:
The first conclusion I reached was that the Cerén chiles were small podded. They certainly were not as large as anchos, whose seeds are twice the width of those of the Cerén chiles. They could, of course, have been chiltepíns, because the seeds were only half a millimeter wider than chiltepín seeds. But if they were somewhere between the size of chiltepíns and piquins, that would have made the pods about 1 centimeter long, less than half an inch. And since there is evidence that the chile pods had been hung up to dry with agave twine, that process would quickly dry the small-podded plants and their fruits.
The correlation between seed size and pod length is not exact. Note that the habanero, which is nine times the length of the chiltepín, has seeds only 1 millimeter wider. Also note that the de árbol variety, which is also 4.5 cm long, but much thinner, has seeds only 1 millimeter wider than the Cerén chiles. I believe that we are witnessing the early domestication process begun by the Mayan people. The complete domestication of chiles from chiltepíns to anchos and the development of many varieties would not happen until the Aztec culture of nearly a millennium after AD 595. This is my personal theory, and I am not a paleoethnobotanist, though sometimes I wish I had studied that discipline.
THE CUISINE OF CERÉN
In addition to the vegetable crops of corn, chiles, beans, maniocs, cacao, and squash, the archaeologists found evidence that the Cerén villagers also harvested wild avocados, palm fruits and nuts, and certain spices such as achiote, or annatto seeds. In fact, Dr. Sheets observes, “The villagers ate better and had a greater variety of foodstuff than their descendants. Traditional families today eat mostly corn and beans, with some rice, squash, and chiles, but rarely any meat. Cerén’s residents ate deer and dog
meat.” They also consumed peccary, mud turtle, duck, and rodent, but deer was their primary meat. Fully 50 percent of the total bones found on the site belonged to white-tailed deer, and many of those deer were immature animals—giving rise to a very interesting theory.
Linda Brown, who wrote the 1996 Field Season Preliminary Report entitled Household and Village Animal Use, notes: “Cerén residents may have practiced some form of deer management. One of the deer procurement strategies the Cerén villagers may have utilized is ‘garden hunting.’ Garden hunting consists of allowing deer to browse in cultivated fields and household gardens where they can be hunted. While some vegetation is lost to browsing, the benefits include easy access to deer when needed.” Expanding upon that theory, she writes:
The ethnohistoric data make many references to the Maya partially taming white-tailed deer. Specifically, historical sources note that it was women who were responsible for taking in, semi-taming, and raising deer. [Diego de] Landa mentioned that women raise other domestic animals and let the deer suck their breasts, by which means they raise them and make them so tame that they never will go into the woods, although they take them and carry them through the woods and raise them there. Apparently, during historic times, there was a designated place in the woods where women would take deer to browse until they needed them. Scholars have argued that pre-Columbian women may have raised deer, dogs, peccary, and fowl much like contemporary Maya women raise pigs and fowl for food, trade, and special occasion feasts. Perhaps the Cerén women raised dog, fowl (a duck was tethered inside the Household 1 bodega), and semi-tamed deer as a contribution to the domestic and ceremonial economy.
It is always a challenge for archaeologists to reconstruct ancient cuisines and cooking techniques. The Cerén villagers did not have metal utensils, but they did have fired ceramics that could be used to boil foods. They could grill over open flames and perhaps fry foods in ceramic pots using cottonseed oil or animal fat. They had obsidian knives that could cut as cleanly as metal. They had metates for grinding corn into flour and molcajetes for grinding fruits, vegetables, chiles, and spices together into sauces.
This was the cuisine—extended into the Aztec world—that existed in the New World before the Spanish and Portuguese arrived.
CAPSICUM-CONQUEROR CONTACT
Christopher Columbus “discovered” chile peppers in the West Indies on his first voyage to the New World. In his journal for 1493, he wrote, “Also there is much Ají, which is their pepper, and the people won’t eat without it, for they find it very wholesome. One could load fifty caravels a year with it in Hispaniola.” (A caravel was a small Spanish or Portuguese sailing vessel of the Middle Ages.)
Dr. Diego Chanca, the fleet physician for Columbus on his second voyage, wrote in his journal that the Indians seasoned maniocs and sweet potatoes with ají, and that it was one of their principal foods. Of course, both Columbus and his doctor believed that they had reached the Spice Islands, or East Indies. Not only did Columbus misname the Indians, he also mistook chiles for black pepper, thus giving them the inaccurate name “pepper.” But he did one thing right—he transported chile seeds back to Europe after his second voyage, which began the chile conquest of the rest of the world.
Explorers who followed Columbus to the New World soon learned that chiles were an integral part of the Indians’ culinary, medical, and religious lives. In 1526, just 34 years after Columbus’s first excursion, El Capitán Gonzalo de Oviedo noted that on the Spanish Main, “Indians everywhere grow it [the chile] in gardens and farms with much diligence and attention because they eat it continuously with almost all their food.”
Bernabé Cobo, a naturalist and historian who traveled throughout Central and South America in the early seventeenth century, estimated that there were at least 40 different varieties. He wrote: “Some [are] as large as limes or large plums; others, as small as pine nuts or even grains of wheat, and between the two extremes are many different sizes. No less variety is found in color . . . and the same difference is found in form and shape.” He noted that in Peru, next to maize, ají was the plant most beloved of the Indians.
Chile peppers were such a novelty to the explorers that rumors were rampant about their medical properties. Wrote the Jesuit priest, poet, and historian José de Acosta in 1590, “Taken moderately, chile helps and comforts the stomach for digestion.” The priest had undoubtedly heard about the reputed aphrodisiac qualities of chiles because he continued his description of chile with the following warning: “But if they take too much, it has bad effects, for of itself it is very hot, fuming, and pierces greatly, so the use thereof is prejudicial to the health of young folks, chiefly to the soul, for it provokes to lust.” Despite the good father’s suspicions, the only thing lustful about chiles was the desire that everyone, including the Spanish, had to devour them.
When the Spanish forces under Cortez arrived in Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) in 1519, they were astounded by the size and complexity of the market at the great plaza of Tlatelolco. According to descriptions by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, it resembled a modern flea market, with thousands of vendors hawking every conceivable foodstuff and other products. The noise of the market could be heard three miles away, and some of the soldiers who had traveled to such places as Rome and Constantinople said it was the largest market they had ever seen. Every product had its own section of the market, and chiles were no exception; they were sold in the second aisle to the right. Sometimes chiles were used as a form of money to buy drinks or other small items.
Most of the chiles sold in the market had been collected as tribute, a form of taxation used by the Toltecs and Aztecs and later adopted by the Spanish. The payers of the tribute were the macehuales, the serfs or commoners; the collectors were Indian officials, or later on, Indian officials who worked for the Spanish. The tribute consisted of locally produced goods or crops that were commonly grown, and the tribute of each village was recorded in boxes on codices of drawn or painted pictographs.
According to many sources, chiles were one of the most common tribute items. The chiles were offered to the government in several different forms: as fresh or dried pods, as seed, in two-hundred-pound bundles, in willow baskets, and in Spanish bushels. After the chiles and the rest of the produce were moved to the capital, everything was stored in warehouses and closely guarded, and then sold. Chile peppers were considered to be the most valuable of the tributes.
One of the most famous tribute codices is the Matrícula de tributos, which is part of the Mendocino Codex. This codex was compiled for the first viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza, who ordered it painted to help inform the Emperor Charles V of the wealth of what is now Mexico. Glyphs on the codex indicate the tribute paid to the Aztecs by conquered towns just before the Spanish conquest; the towns on one tribute list (in the area of what is now San Luis Potosí) gave 1,600 loads of dry chiles to the imperial throne each year!
The Mendocino Codex also reveals an early use of chile peppers in punishment. One pictograph shows a father punishing his 11-year-old son by forcing him to inhale smoke from roasting chiles. The same drawing shows a mother threatening her 6-year-old daughter with the same punishment. Today, the Popolocan Indians who live near Oaxaca punish their children in a similar manner.
Wherever they traveled in the New World, Spanish explorers, particularly nonsoldiers, collected and transported chile seeds and thus further spread the different varieties. And not only did they adopt the chile as their own, the Spanish also imported foods that they combined with chiles and other native ingredients to create even more complex chile cuisines.
FEATURED CHILE PEPPER: CHILTEPÍN
Botanists believe that these wild chiles (C. annuum var. glabriusculum) are the closest surviving species to the earliest forms of chiles that developed in Bolivia and southern Brazil long before mankind arrived in the New World. The small size of their fruits was perfect for dissemination by birds, and the wild chiles spread all over South and Central America and u
p to what is now the United States border millennia before the domesticated varieties arrived. It is possible that they have the widest distribution of any wild chile variety; they range from Peru north to the Caribbean, Florida, and Louisiana, and west to Arizona.
There is a wide variation in pod shapes, from tiny ones the size and shape of BBs to elongated pods a half inch long. By contrast, domesticated piquins have much longer pods, up to three inches. The chiltepíns most prized in Mexico are spherical and measure five to eight millimeters in diameter. They are among the hottest chiles of the annuum species, measuring up to 100,000 SHU.
The word chiltepín is believed to be derived from the Aztec-language (Nahuatl) combination word chilli + tecpintl, meaning “flea chile,” an allusion to its sharp bite. That word was altered to chiltecpin, then to the Spanish chiltepín, and finally Anglicized to chilipiquin, as the plant is known in Texas. In Sonora and southern Arizona, chiltepíns grow in microhabitats in the transition zone between mountain and desert, which receive as little as 10 inches of rain per year.
Chiltepín pod in the author’s garden. Photograph by Dave DeWitt
They grow beneath “nurse” trees such as mesquite, oak, and palmetto, which provide shelter from direct sunlight, heat, and frost. In the summer, there is higher humidity beneath the nurse trees, and legumes such as mesquite fix nitrogen in the soil—a perfect fertilizer for the chiltepíns. Nurse trees also protect the plant from grazing by cattle, sheep, goats, and deer. Chiltepíns planted in the open, without nurse trees, usually die from the effects of direct solar radiation.
