Maize

In Yucatán, a Maya farmer carried a small bag of seed on his back. He made a hole in the ground with a pointed stick, dropped in five or six grains of maize, and covered them with the same stick. Farmers across the Americas planted this way, in holes or small hills.

Maize grew from a wild grass called teosinte. People in the tropical lowlands of southern Mexico began to change it about 9,000 years ago. A partly tamed form of the plant reached South America by about 6,500 years ago, when it was grown on the coast of Peru, in the Andes and in the Bolivian Amazon. Farmers there kept improving it, probably first in the southwestern Amazon. Farther north, tiny plant remains in food crusts on cooking pots show maize was used in what is now New York by about 2,300 years ago, but it became a main crop there only many centuries later. In much of eastern North America, maize was grown with beans and squash, the crops the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) call the Three Sisters. Among the Haudenosaunee and many of their neighbors, women did most of the farming.

By 1500, maize was grown from what is now southern Canada to Chile, and for many peoples it was sacred as well as food. In the sacred book of the K'iche' Maya, the creators make the first people from yellow and white maize after failing with mud and wood. After 1492 the grain crossed the Atlantic, and it became a main food in parts of Africa and elsewhere in the world.

The library has many early accounts. The People Made of Maize is that passage from the K'iche' Popol Vuh. Maize, Markets and Books in Yucatán, by the friar Diego de Landa, describes Maya planting teams and fields. Maize and Cassava Bread, by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, tells how fields on Hispaniola were burned, planted with a stick and guarded by boys against parrots. The Great Market of Tenochtitlan lists syrup made from maize stalks among the goods for sale. Corn, Land, and the Women's Fields, by Roger Williams, shows Narragansett women planting, hoeing and drying corn, and The First Winter and Squanto's Corn, by William Bradford, tells how Tisquantum (Squanto) showed the English at Plymouth how to plant it in 1621.