Abstract
In the last 30 years, archaeologists worldwide have expanded their interests to include the significance of foodways to our understanding of prehistory. Many of the theories and ideas scholars currently have regarding the economic and cultural significance of food to the development of Mesoamerican civilization were directly influenced by ethnohistorians and sixteenth century documents, indigenous pictorial codices, and interpretations of hieroglyphic writing (Las Casas 1971 [1527–1565]; Gerbi 1985 [1975]; Boone 2000).
In this study, sixteenth century documents, pictorial codices, as well as iconographic and hieroglyphic texts are evaluated in order to consider how earlier Indo-European perceptions of the New World influenced our current understanding of the roles and importance of food to human sociocultural development. The goal of this analysis is to demonstrate that such colonial documents (both Native and European) are particularly useful for the purposes of studying foodways in general, and the roles and uses of certain plants and dishes in particular. Numerous figures in this study are derived from pre-Linnaean herbals from the sixteenth century. These botanical sources were of course not selected for their scientific value regarding taxonomy or classification, but rather, for what they can tell us about inherent European biases and perceptions regarding New World plant species and their subsequent roles in these cultures and their cuisines. The names given various food crops and statements made about them can potentially reveal a great deal about how they were perceived in the sixteenth century. Much regarding the roles of ancient foodways was transformed during the Age of Enlightenment. However, many earlier beliefs and preconceptions continued in various ways to influence our understanding of how New World food crops subsequently changed cuisines throughout the world. Emphasis is therefore given to inherent biases, both cultural and religious, and how such differences in perception may have influenced subsequent research on the roles of food crops and economic plants to our understanding of ancient political economy and the rise of Mesoamerican civilization. The earliest primary and secondary accounts regarding the role of food to rituals, festivals, and ancient economy are given priority (see e.g., Schwartz 2000; Anderson et al. 1976; Barber and Berdan 1998).
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Notes
- 1.
European arrivals in the New World initiated processes of cultural change that were sometimes rapid and catastrophic, sometimes protracted and complex. The only region in the New World in which a highly specialized native literary tradition already existed before the Contact Period was Mesoamerica (Anderson et al. 1976).
- 2.
Spanish influence in part stimulated the rich corpus of native Quichean documents written during the sixteenth century. The fact that some of the Spaniards as well as the Mesoamerican scribes were literate is important for the study of Native culture and therefore of potential value to archaeological reconstruction (Carmack 1973; Carmack et al. 1996; Schwartz 2000).
- 3.
Gruzinski (2001) Images at War also provides an examination of this process with regard to images.
- 4.
The conquistador Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro wanted his reports to the Spanish crown to justify his actions and those of his army. He had essentially absolute power in the Mexican capital of New Spain and a distinguished author, Francisco Lopez de Gómara (1966 [1553]) write the history of the conquest for him (Schwartz 2000:159–161).
- 5.
This may be in part why Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s (1953 [1567–1575]) first-hand accounts of the conquest were rewritten years after the events he witnessed had taken place. Díaz’s account was completed about 1567 and sent to Spain in 1575, where it remained unnoticed in the papers of the Council of the Indies and was finally published in 1632 (Cerwin 1963; Saenz and Maria 1984).
- 6.
Chaldeans were a Babylonian society that occupied the Plain of Sennaar in the Persian Gulf in the 6th century BC. Chaldean oracles played an important role in Hellenistic religious cults between 100 BC-AD 100. Knowledge of such ancient societies came to Europe with the revived interested in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
- 7.
According to the Capitulaciones, the formal agreement between the Spanish Crown and Christopher Columbus, the explorer would become the viceroy and governor-general of any and all lands and islands he discovered (Columbus 1970 [1492]:23; Ife 1990:xvi). The Spanish Crown would take ninety percent of all the income generated from the territories under his jurisdiction (Ife 1990:xvi–xvii). In the prologue to the Journal of the expedition itself, it is written; “Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians and princes devoted to the holy Christian faith and the furtherance of its cause, and enemies of the sect of Mohammed and of all idolatry and heresy, resolved to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said regions of India to see the said princes and the peoples and lands and determine the nature of them and of all other things, and the measures to be taken to convert them to our holy faith; and you ordered that I should not go by land to the East, which is the customary route, but by way of the West, a route which to this day we cannot be certain has been taken by anyone else” (Columbus 1990 [1492]:23). The accounts provide considerable detail regarding religious rituals because many ecclesiastics and political authorities were focused upon identifying “pagan idolatry.” Thus, accounts by religious clerics are generally rich sources of information for Pre-Columbian scholars.
- 8.
The Protestant Reformation threatened the power and authority of the Catholic Church in Europe, as many Catholics were troubled by what they saw as false doctrines within the church, particularly the teaching and sale of plenary indulgences (Tentler 1977). When Rome was sacked in 1527 by the mutinous troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, this marked a crucial victory for the Holy Roman Empire over the League of Cognac, which allied the Vatican with France, Florence, Milan and Venice (ibid.). The sacking of this great religious and cultural center was a harbinger of the overall decline of the authority and power of the Catholic Church throughout Europe in later decades (Coe 1994:32). Another factor that fostered the Protestant Reformation was the spread of literacy, particularly the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg c. 1439. Such advances had a direct effect upon how and to what detail discoveries in the New World were recorded and disseminated.
- 9.
The clergy were generally the most literate and highly educated of the Europeans who first came to this hemisphere, and they were the first to focus upon and learn to speak the native languages. Around 1540, Las Casas came to the defense of the Indians of Guatemala and initiated his program of peaceful pacification in Veracruz (Las Casas 1992 [1552]). The Apologética Historía de las Indias remained in manuscript form until 1909, when it was published in Madrid (Sepulveda and Las Casas 1975 [c. 1540]). The sympathetic, ethnographic tradition of the Dominicans persisted for over two centuries. The Franciscans, who first came to the New World in the 1530s, never developed an ethnographic tradition equal to that of the Dominicans. Nevertheless, their excellent dictionaries (Quiche and Cakchiquel) attest to an early interest in proselytizing and the native cultures (Ochoa and Jaime 2005).
- 10.
The first part of Oviedo’s De La Natural Hystoria de Las Indias appeared during 1535 in Seville. However, the complete work was not published until 1851–1855 for the Spanish Academy of History. Though written in a diffuse style, it embodies a mass of curious information collected first hand. The incomplete Seville edition was widely read in the English and French versions published respectively in 1555 and 1556 (Fernández de Oviedo 1969 [1535]).
- 11.
Maize was initially referred to by its common name, which is taken from the Taíno-Arawakan word mahiz or “life-giver” (Weatherwax 1954; Sauer 1950). Such references may have predisposed Europeans to emphasize its economic importance to the rise of New World civilizations. Gerard (1975 [1633]:81) has an image of the “Corne of Asia” suggesting that at this time some botanists believed maize may have come to Turkey from the Far East.
- 12.
Leonhard Fuchs was one of the founding fathers of botany. His herbal De historia stirpium commentarii insignes…” was first published in Latin in 1542, and attempted to identify plants described by the classical authors. The 1543 German edition has descriptions of about 100 domesticated and 400 wild plant species as well as their medical uses (Krafft und Würckung) in alphabetical order. Fuchs made no attempt at a natural system of classification, but the wood cuts were however based upon first-hand descriptions, as well as botanical samples and are anatomically and morphologically accurate. Many later sixteenth to eighteenth century herbals have copied images from this herbal. Fuchs’ herbal includes 512 images of plants, largely locally grown, and printed from woodcuts. These include some of the earliest depictions of maize and chili peppers in the Old World. Portraits of the illustrators, Heinrich Füllmauer and Albert Meyer, as well as the woodcutter Veit Rudolph Speckle, are contained in the volume. Like the original Latin edition of 1542, the 1543 German edition was printed at the famous shop in Basel (Finan 1950:159).
- 13.
Austin (1988) postulated that the sweet potato (I. batatas) was originally domesticated somewhere between the Yucatán Peninsula and the mouth of the Orinoco River at least 5,000 years ago and spread into South America at around this time.
- 14.
Pumpkins may get their symbolic association with Halloween or Feast of All Souls because it is at around this time of the year when they ripen in the northern hemisphere. What are generally called winter squashes were probably famine foods in the Neotropics, since they usually ripen around the middle of the dry season.
- 15.
Ancient DNA sequence analysis of archaeological bottle gourd specimens and comparison with modern Asian and African landraces indicate the species is native to Asia. Bottle gourds were used as containers and may have been domesticated by hunters and gatherers at the beginning of the Holocene (Erickson et al. 2005).
- 16.
The earliest uncalibrated AMS dates from macrobotanical squash and gourd remains at Coxcatlan Cave in the Tehuacán Valley include a domesticated Curcurbita pepo seed dated to 7100 BP, and bottle gourds (Lagenaria siceraria) dating back to 6300 BP, but fig leaf squash (C. argyosperma) appeared more recently than previously estimated, with AMS samples ranging between AD 1420 and 1520 (Smith 2005:9442:Table 1). The sudden increase in curcurbit and gourd species in the sixteenth century may be related to their role as famine food among New World populations. The destruction of regional redistribution networks no doubt had widespread devastating, and in some cases catastrophic effects in different regions of Mesoamerica (see e.g., Sepulveda and Las Casas 1975 [c. 1540]).
- 17.
The phylogenetic relationships between cucumbers and melons have only recently been unraveled through molecular biology (see Ghebretinsae et al. 2007).
- 18.
Chinampas were stationary artificial islands that measured roughly 30 by 2.5 m (Townsend 2000).
- 19.
Agronomists define multiple cropping as growing two or more crops in the same field within the annual agricultural cycle (Mt. Pleasant 2006:534). Multiple cropping was common to various regions of the Caribbean and Mesoamerica and has been found to enhance environmental quality as well as cultivation, particularly in regions prone to flooding (ibid.:530–531).
- 20.
Note: The Aztecs did not call themselves by that name, but rather the “Mexica.” Although this term is commonly used in the recent ethnohistoric literature (see e.g., Schwartz 2000; Ochoa and Jaime 2005), I have, for the sake of clarity chosen to refer to them by the name they are commonly known in the literature.
- 21.
Manioc leaves cannot be consumed raw since they contain free and bound cyanogenic glucosides, which convert into cyanide in the presence of a naturally occurring enzyme in cassava. Cassava varieties are often categorized as either “sweet” or “bitter,” signifying the absence or presence of high toxic levels of cyanogenic glucosides (White et al. 1998).
- 22.
The common tomato is native to South America where seven wild species have been identified, ranging from Ecuador into Chile (Coe 1994:47). The husk tomato (Physalis philadelphica L.) was initially domesticated in Mexico and identified archaeologically in the Tehuacán highlands in levels dated to between AD 825 and 1225 (ibid.).
- 23.
- 24.
The orchid family is one of the largest (with 880 genera and 25,000 species) pertaining to the family Orchidaceae (Rain 2004:2–5). The word “vanilla” first entered the English language in 1754, in a gardener’s dictionary where a botanist wrote about the genus (Correll 1953:292). By the mid 1700s, vanilla spread all over Europe, and for over three centuries Mexico was the leading producer of vanilla (Rain 2004).
- 25.
The religious scholar Mircea Eliade (1959:20–21) spoke of this phenomenon in terms of religious thought by comparing it to the conceptual realization of the heterogeneity of geographic space, in that, “… some parts of space are qualitatively different from others… this spatial non-homogeneity finds expression in the experience of an opposition between space that is sacred… and formless expanse surrounding it.” He goes on to observe that “When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the non-reality of the vast surrounding expanse. The selection of this island capital in Aztec mythology suggests this was a major cultural and religious center to the Aztec and Mesoamerican people.
- 26.
The Aztec destroyed large amounts of prestige goods and even ritually sacrificed humans in the course of their state/court rituals and festivals suggesting both redistribution and ritual destruction of wealth was a huge driving force of their economy. Contact Period political economies were based upon tribute, storage, redistribution as well as destruction of material wealth, goods and human resources (Carrasco 1999:81–85).
- 27.
The first Viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza commissioned the Codex Mendoza, at the behest of the Crown, with the goal of creating a history of the Pre-Columbian Aztec and the Mexíca people (Carrasco 1999:19). The pictorial document consisted of seventy-one folios on Spanish paper, which although directed by the head of the Aztec painters guild, Francisco Gualpuyogualcal was overseen by the Spaniards, and its contents conditioned to some extent by them. The images are described in Spanish by the cleric Juan Gonzalez, with extensive commentaries and annotations (Carrasco 1999:19–20; Schwartz 2000:221–222). The manuscript was sent to the Crown in Spain, but lost in transit to French pirates. The French humanist André Thévet ultimately sold it to the British scholar Richard Hakluyt (Schwartz 2000:222). After Hakluyt died in 1616, it was translated and published in 1625 by Samuel Purchas, and finally came into the possession of John Seldon, who ultimately donated it to the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford (Carrasco 1999:20–21).
- 28.
The Chontal Maya grew no less than four crops of cacao within the annual cycle – the principle crop was between April and July (Coe and Coe 1996:59).
- 29.
Aztec deities may be grouped into three broad categories: Those associated with the earth and agricultural fertility, creator gods involved with the beginnings and ends of cosmological and world cycles, and those, like their patron deity Huitzilopochtli associated with the cult of war and human sacrifice (Schwartz 2000:9; Carrasco 1999:23).
- 30.
Davíd Carrasco (1999:200) has indicated that in Aztec botanical thought maize kernels were believed to be composed of the visible seed and the invisible “heart of maize” and once planted they were immersed into the underworld, a place called Tlalocan, a colossal receptacle enclosed in the cosmic mountain. Aztecs believed that the only way for maize kernels to become active seed was for that seed to be united with the “heart” (ibid.).
- 31.
The Yucatec Maya were also noted for providing deities offerings of food and incense while their lords were given a drink of toasted (parched) maize (Landa 1975 [1566]:101).
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Acknowledgments
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Michael D. Carrasco (Florida State University), Brian Stross (University of Texas), and Jeffrey R. Parsons (University of Michigan) for their comments, and the insights they brought to this study. Special thanks to Christine Giannoni (Field Museum Library), for providing access to the pre-Linnaean and colonial herbals in the rare books collection. All interpretations and statements of fact are my own, and any errors of fact or misinterpretation of the data should not in any way reflect on these scholars.
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Staller, J.E. (2010). Ethnohistoric Sources on Foodways, Feasts, and Festivals in Mesoamerica. In: Staller, J., Carrasco, M. (eds) Pre-Columbian Foodways. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0471-3_2
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