The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  Drinking and driving (and riding) were arguably of even greater concern in the past than they are now. Their interaction played a crucial role in the evolution of religious life, an interaction that was simply not available in the New World. The long-term effects of the replacement of narcotics by alcohol will be played out throughout the rest of this book.

  • 11 •

  MAIZE: WHAT PEOPLE ARE MADE OF

  If we had to sum up what has gone before and describe in a few words the main features shaping early life in the Old World, those words would be: the weakening monsoon, cereals (grain), domesticated mammals and pastoralism, the plough and the traction complex, riding, megaliths, milk, alcohol. One way to highlight the differences between the two worlds is to perform the same summing-up exercise for the Americas before we embark further on our journey. For the New World the crucial and equivalent words would be: El Niño, volcanoes, earthquakes, maize (corn), the potato, hallucinogens, tobacco, chocolate, rubber, the jaguar, and the bison.

  This simple list immediately shows that, with the absence of domesticated mammals (we shall come to the llama and its cousins presently), the New World was for humans a much more vegetal environment than the Old World and that simple difference is profound. For a start, it meant that people in the New World were tied to the land much more than those in the Old World. For the most part (not invariably, but for the most part), they were tied to the land and the plants that they knew, and as a result their mobility was restricted. As was first mentioned in chapter six, there was little pastoralism or nomadism in the New World, and what there was did not have the historical impact that these life-ways did in the Old World. Allied to this, with people more rooted to the land, the movement of ideas was restricted, too. Not completely restricted but more restricted. The overall impact of this was to slow down the pace of development in the New World, as compared with the Old, and to ensure that certain features of the Old World that we take for granted never appeared in the Americas – pastoralism and nomadism have already been referred to, so have the wheel and the plough, not to mention – as we shall see – various religious innovations. It is worth reminding ourselves that at the time of European contact with the aborigines of Australia in the late eighteenth century, when the continent had a population of 300,000, there was not a single domesticated plant.1 And that was also true of the !Kung in the Kalahari. There would appear to be nothing ‘inevitable’ about the course of human development.

  So far as the specific aspects of the New World are concerned, it is tempting to start with maize, or corn, since that plant is a grain, and was to prove as important in its way for the New World as wheat and barley and rice were for the Old and, since contact times, has proved its worth right across the globe. However, it makes more sense instead to start with the potato because, in its primary region, it was never replaced by maize as so many other cultigens were.

  ROOTED IN THE ANDES

  Although species of the wild tuber-bearing Solanums may be found as far north as Colorado, according to Redcliffe Salaman the potato was never cultivated in Central or North America in pre-Columbian times. (It was sometimes eaten but never cultivated.) In South America, on the other hand, there are many forms of wild potato and it has been cultivated there for at least 2,500 years.2 Some 2,500 forms of root tuber are known in the Andes and potatoes were found at the early site of Monte Verde (mentioned above, in chapters 2 and 4), dated to 12,500 years ago. One of the initial drawbacks of the potato was that its glycoalkaloids can be poisonous unless it is properly prepared and its natural bitterness taken away.3 This is why in some areas it was eaten with small amounts of earth – mainly clay – which removes the bitterness and counters the poisonous effects of the glycoalkaloids. (Some monkeys and birds have been observed to do the same thing.) The fact that ingenious ways needed to be found to overcome the potential poisons within the potato would have slowed down its domestication.

  The significance of the potato lies in its adaptation to great heights and the associated cold. The earliest migrants in the Andes almost certainly came from the east, from the Amazon basin. The genetic evidence referred to in chapter one supports this idea, and so too does the decoration found on the earliest pottery in the Andes. If immigrants had come from anywhere else (down the coast, or even across the Pacific) he or she would not have found the jaguar and the boa constrictor so fearsome as they obviously did (because they would not have encountered them), or the potato and coca plant so useful, each of these animals and plants being shown as decoration on the earliest South American ceramics.

  Maize cannot be grown above 12,000 feet, and is rarely found above 11,000 feet. At higher altitudes, only the potato, quinoa and oca can be grown but the potato far outweighs the others in importance (except around Tiwanaku, in western Bolivia, where quinoa takes precedence). It was thus the potato that enabled early man to settle in the highlands and escape malaria and the other diseases (and fears) of the rainforest or jungle. These highlands are not the most hospitable of environments but the Andes chain does stretch 4,000 miles from north to south, so that it is scarcely a small area. Moreover, llamas and other camelids are at home at such heights, so the Andes are not quite such an improbable area to be settled.

  On the Andean highlands, from Colombia in the north to Chile in the south, several naturally occurring species of wild, tuber-bearing Solanums grew, among them the parent of the potato as we know it today. Some varieties can exist even at the snow line, at 15,000–16,000 feet, though they are scarcely edible. But at lower levels, when they do yield useful crops of tubers, they are still very resistant to frost. It was their great variability, and their ability to adapt to different soils and altitudes, that made them so useful to the early Andeans. The mountain chain crosses many latitudes and its valleys and high plains exist at different altitudes and face different directions. The potato had adapted to all these different niches.

  The earliest way of preserving the potato, known today as chuño, was in use at least 2,000 years ago but probably goes back much earlier. The smallest potatoes are usually selected, laid out on flat ground and allowed to freeze overnight. This process lasts for three nights in a row but between the nights the potatoes are exposed to full sunlight, when they are trampled by foot. This action removes any remaining water and the skins. They are then exposed to two more nights of freezing and once dried they can last for months, or even years, and may be used as flour, or in soups, mixed with meat. Not much use was made of llama meat in ancient times, and none at all of llama milk. The chief source of animal protein was the guinea pig, allowed to run free in dwellings.4

  The potato could be planted at any time of the year and in many areas more than one crop was produced, the limiting factor being frost. In general, though, the higher a potato was grown the less taste it had, and at higher altitudes most potatoes went into chuño manufacture.5 Chuño was traded far and wide, mainly in exchange for maize, manioc and ceramics.

  Recent experiments and excavations have shown that the ancient Bolivians discovered that, by building raised terraces, and leaving rain-water between them, temperatures could be manipulated so that the terraces were some six degrees warmer than the surrounding land and the effects of severe frost could be cleverly minimised. The Andeans were far more sophisticated in their growing techniques than they have usually been given credit for.

  The earliest potato-growing cultures were known as Proto-Chimu and Proto-Nazca (~1100 BC), when the first representations of potatoes are found on pottery. There are signs that it was a cult object on the coast (i.e., worshipped) but the designs on the pots are also notable for several particular features.6 One is that the images of maize and potatoes occur on the pots alongside those of jaguars and pumas, the jaguars often baring their teeth and snarling, suggesting it was worshipped as a ferocious god (we shall come back to this, more than once). Second, there are many depictions of maimed individuals, of people with congenital harelips, with faces deformed in other ways, s
uch as with split noses, and still other pots depicting figures with amputated legs. The suggestion is that these people were felt to be special or sacred in some way, possibly that they were seen as half-way creatures, half-way between humans and jaguars perhaps. The figures with amputated legs could have been depictions of individuals who had been attacked by jaguars and survived. Some of the deformities are swellings, perhaps indicating (to us) infections, but which ancient peoples equated to (naturally occurring) deformities in potato shapes and therefore sacred in some way. If so, this reinforces the fact that the potato itself was also regarded as sacred. There are known to have been ceremonies with both the potato and the coca plant worshipped.7 (The coca plant was also sacred – see chapter 13).8

  Essentially, then, the potato, together with the llama and the vicuña, enabled early man to live in the Andes, an otherwise inhospitable environment though one that was, relatively speaking, safe and disease-free. Unlike grasses, however, and this is important, the potato kept the Andeans where they were: the early potato did not travel.

  THE PRIMACY OF BEER

  Since contact times, the potato and the maize (corn) plant have proved so useful to the rest of the world that we now tend to regard them as ‘miracle’ plants, and this is true so far as it goes. Potatoes and maize now provide staple foodstuffs across huge areas of the globe.

  But this world-wide admiration for maize conceals the fact that much recent research has changed dramatically our understanding of the ancient plant – its history is nowhere near as straightforward as once was thought. The traditional view, insofar as there was one, was that maize is a grain, like wheat and barley and that, like them, it proved to be the basis of agriculture in the New World, enabling surpluses to be built up, and it was therefore directly associated with sedentism and, eventually, the emergence of urban civilisation. Its early morphology, as a wild plant, had much greater differences from the domesticated variety than did wheat or barley, say, and this, combined with the north-south configuration of the New World, conspired to produce circumstances where civilisation took longer to develop in the Americas.9

  This picture is no longer tenable.

  Maize, Zea mays, must now count as one of the most studied botanical entities in history. It has been studied by botanists, of course, but also by anthropologists, by geographers, by archaeologists and geoscientists, by linguists and evolutionary geneticists, by desertologists and horticulturalists, by land management specialists and Indian preservationists. And the new picture which has emerged is consistent, producing four main conclusions:

  Maize came into use much later than early studies reported;

  Its primary use, in most places, was as beer, used in religious ritual;

  Its spread across the New World was even slower than previously thought, and much, much slower than the spread of cereals in the Old World;

  Even when ancient peoples in the western hemisphere adopted the use of maize, there was no great rapid spread of farming in the New World as there was in the Old, nothing like the historical force that gave rise to the expansion, for instance, of the Proto-Indo-European language.

  The actual origin of maize does seem to be settled. It developed from a wild annual, teosinte, the present-day range of which is centred in the Rio Balsas region of western Mexico, extending west to Jalisco and south-east to Oaxaca, with one early site there, at the Guila Naquitz cave, showing teosinte at levels dated to 3420 ± 60 BC.10 By around 2500 BC, people were selecting the grain for larger kernel sizes, and for increased protein and starch quality and, by 1800 BC, cobs had been developed which had no shattering rachis (or stem), showing that Zea was already dependent on humans for dispersal.11 There was a long period of improvement in maize, though it seems to have undergone its greatest change at about AD 200.

  The central problem with maize is that many of the early – and spectacularly ancient – dates have been shown to be wrong. At one site in northern Chile, for example, where early dates for maize were put at 6000–5000 BC, later research has changed that to AD 1050 ± 32. The main reason for this has caused a new word to be coined, ‘bioturbation’, the process by which animals – such as crabs – can contaminate archaeological sites, driving material closer to the surface deeper into the ground, associating those later remains with earlier stratigraphic levels.12

  Part of the problem has stemmed from the fact that, in many cases, maize pollen and maize phytoliths – what are generally referred to as ‘microbotanical’ remains – are at variance with ‘macrobotanical’ remains, the residue of actual plants, stalks or leaves. (Phytoliths are microscopic remains, usually of silica, which do not decay and allow ancient plants to be identified and dated.) In the Lake Titicaca region, for example, macrobotanical remains are consistently about a millennium later than maize phytoliths.13

  A revealing clue to this disparity comes from the observation that, even today, many people in the central Americas chew the stalk of teosinte, the sugary juice still being used in beer production by people such as the Tarahumara in northern Mexico.14

  So this hypothesis, that the early spread and use of Zea (either teosinte or incipient maize) was prompted by the value of the stalks in producing a fermentable juice, may well explain some of the anomalies in the early studies. It could certainly explain why pollen and phytoliths have been found much earlier than macrobotanical remains – in its early use it was never stored as grain, but used for its sugar and this seems to be supported by surveys recently reported from Ecuador, highland Peru, Mexico, and Mato Grosso in Brazil, that in the very earliest times maize was primarily a ritual plant used to make fermented beer or chichi (or chicha), consumed in the context of gift-giving, ritual feasts or other religious ceremonies. As happened in the Old World, ceramic bottles may well have been invented to manipulate beer – and may explain why maize was depicted on the bottles discovered at the temple of Chavín de Huántar (850–300 BC). In sites such as En Bas Saline, Loma Alta and La Centinela in Ecuador, ritual feasting contexts strongly suggest that maize was first appreciated as beer, for its intoxicating properties, and that this was the primary use for ceramics. These practices lasted from 4000 to 800 BC.

  To an extent the linguistic evidence supports this interpretation. In some languages, Uto-Aztecian, for example, the terms for maize differ markedly, suggesting such peoples were familiar with it long before it became significant economically. Among the Mayan languages, however, the terms for maize are so similar that they must have coincided with its (much later) rapid adoption as an economically significant staple food.15

  If we might call the development of chichi beer phase one in the use of maize, phase two occurred when it became widespread as a crop in the fourth millennium BC (it generally appears in the record around 3500 BC). However, it was nowhere a major dietary element before the first millennium BC – so let’s call this phase, when maize achieved the status of a staple food, phase three. Sometimes the delay was even longer: among the Teenek on the Gulf coast near modern-day Veracruz, for example, maize was present at 7000 BC but permanent villages, with ceremonial centres based on maize agriculture, do not appear until 500 BC. In Soconusco, a region not far geographically from the place of origin of Zea, the stable isotope signatures indicate that maize does not become economically important until several thousand years after its appearance in that area. (Stable isotopes are a measure of bone chemistry derived from the main foodstuffs people eat during their lifetime.)

  It is the same story in Andean South America where, in Ecuador, for example, maize does not become economically significant until after the first millennium BC and in coastal and highland Peru almost a thousand years after that.16 Maize shows up in the Andean diet at ~2200–1850 BC but does not measure as significant in bone chemistry until two millennia later. In Peruvian sites which contain ceramics, maize is not an economic staple, but is only associated with ceremonial, including the very early site at Aspero (see chapter 15), where Ruth Shady, the lead excavator, confirms that
maize had only ceremonial significance, often being left as a ritual offering, but was ‘peripheral’ as an economic force.

  Its appearance on the altiplano of the Titicaca Basin, at ~750 BC, shows that even then, maize only occurs in elite and ceremonial contexts and never (as is true today) achieved economic importance.17 Around the Titicaca Basin itself a few grains of maize are found as early as 900 BC but it doesn’t become economically important until after AD 250. The evidence suggests that Tiwanaku was an exchange (trade) centre for many different kinds of plants, the point being that, in the Andes, different plants would grow at different altitudes and so communities at one level would have regarded plants that grew at other levels (but not at theirs) as luxuries, which would have been much in demand. Among these sought-after plants were coca, peppers, hallucinogens and maize.

  Some archaeologists have proposed the model of the ‘vertical archipelago’ in these circumstances, in which different members of the same kin group occupy different altitude/ecological zones, growing different plants and exchanging them with their kinfolk. Alternatively, this state of affairs has been used to explain the domestication of the llama, with llama caravans being employed as the major source of inter-zonal trade or exchange.18

  The Maya elite did become maize-dependent but this was not until AD 200–900 and even then the society was not uniformly reliant on it. In fact, there is some evidence that Mayan men ate more maize than women, possible evidence of yet more religious/ceremonial significance.19

  With the Incas, even later, as we shall again see in another chapter, there was widespread growing of maize, but once more this was mainly for the production of chicha beer. In fact, vast quantities of maize were grown, with whole populations being forced to move, so as to grow the plant, which was turned into beer in enormous quantities for ceremonial purposes. The growing and distribution of intoxicants was a central element in the way the Inca elite maintained its authority. John Staller, an anthropologist from the University of Kentucky, says that chicha beer consumption among the Inca was so common as to make a significant contribution to the diet. ‘The prominence of maize as beer and food in ritual surrounding the Inca Solar cult, the Cult of the Dead, and ancestor veneration, reflects a close symbolic link to status and rank.’20 Chicha, he says, had several overlapping meanings, including ‘to fertilise’, ‘water’ and ‘saliva’. In Inca ceremonies, drinking alcohol took pre-eminence over eating. Chicha was also intimately involved in Inca sacrificial rituals as we shall see later.21