Maya Manioc

ScienceDaily is reporting the discovery of ancient manioc cultivation site in El Salvador, this site is important is because it was previously unknown how the large Maya cities (like Tikal or Copan) were able to support their populations on only beans and corn. Manioc is an excellent source of nutrition and would have been useful in feeding a large number of people. I do have some issues with this article, it does not refer to an article (if there is one, it would be nice to know), which means the discovery may not have been published in a scientific venue. This seems to be increasingly common among archaeological sites. This is unfortunate because there may be issues with the site and its impact. The other thing is manioc is a South American domesticate so there had to be some interaction between groups through trade 1,400 years ago.

This discovery does go a long when in increasing our understanding of agriculture in Mesoamerica. There is often a misconception regarding the complexity of agricultural development in the region, where new dates have pushed back to approximately 8,000 to 10,000 years before present for a number of new world domesticates in South America including arrowroot, squash, gourds (Cooke, 2005) and years for maize (Pipererno et al. 2007). This places the origins of agriculture near the early domesticates in the old world. This is actually an exciting area of study and I'm sure several new discoveries will come out over the next decade.

References

Cooke R. 2005. Prehistory of Native Americans on the Central American Land Bridge: colonization, dispersal, and divergence. J Archaeological Res 13:129–187.

Piperno DR, Moreno JE, Iriarte J, Holst I, Lachniet M, Jones JG, Ranere AJ, Castanzo R. 2007. Late Pleistocene and Holocene environmental history of the Iguala Valley, Central Balsas Watershed of Mexico. PNAS. 104(29)11874-81.