John E. Staller. Maize cobs and cultures: history of Zea mays L.

Hammond, Norman

JOHN E. STALLER. Maize cobs and cultures: history of Zea mays L. x+262 pages, 66 b&w & colour illustrations, 7 tables. 2010. Heidelberg: Springer; 978-3-642-0405-9 hardback 117 [pounds sterling]; 978-3-642-04506-6 e-book

Maize is today a staple crop across the Old World, from Albania to Zimbabwe: It is sometimes difficult to remember that little more than half a millennium ago Zea mays was confined to the Americas. It was the New World's only cereal staple, cultivated from the northeastern United States all the way south into Argentina and Chile. What the early British settlers of North America called 'Indian corn' is so genetically plastic, and so adaptable to the vagaries of climate, that not long after its initial domestication as a mutant of teosinte in southern Mesoamerica it had spread south through the humid tropics into the Andes, and became the energy source that underwrote the emergence of complex societies in both regions.

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The importance of maize has been recognised in recent books, including Histories of Maize (Staller et al. 2006) of which John Staller was lead editor. The volume under review is Staller's own presentation of facts and ideas about this protean crop, but is less satisfactory than the collections to which he has contributed.

There is a clear plan, outlined in main, sub- and sub-sub headings: after a very brief introduction, Chapter 2 is titled 'Ethnohistory: Impressions and Perceptions of Maize', Chapter 3 'Scientific, Botanical, and Biological Research on Maize' and Chapter 4 'Ethnobotanic, Interdisciplinary, and Multidisciplinary Methodologies'. The concept is fine; the execution problematic. Many of the sections read as though they were written separately and then simply bolted together: throughout the book there is significant repetition of statements and citations and there is no sign of peer-review having had any impact. The book could have used a copy-editor, and at this exorbitant price should certainly have had one.

The grammar, punctuation and sentence structure are sometimes chaotic, with missing verbs, an excess of definite articles, a plague of needless commas and numerous non sequiturs; some statements I find it hard to believe Staller intended, for instance that Landa's Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan was written in Latin (p. 17), that Mexicans made tortillas but not tamales (p. 28), and that a comal (a griddle) is a woman's garment (p. 34). On p. 131 he claims that 'scientific research [on maize] soon became the domain of the industrial sector of the first world, and was an anathema to much of the third world'; I'm not sure what Staller thinks 'anathema' means. The illustrations are poor, sometimes irrelevant (the Habsburg lands in Europe and family coat of arms, fig. 2.3, for example) but the thirty-page bibliography--though more suited to a scientific treatise--is probably the most useful part of the book and admirably up-to-date.

Following the short but sensible introduction, the chapter on ethnohistory begins with several pages of irrelevant European history and even less relevant footnotes, and then reviews native and ethnohistoric sources from Mesoamerica and South America: it would appear that maize was principally used as a grain in the former, as a fermented beverage, chicha, in the latter, and with religious significance in both areas (unsurprising, given the supernatural origin ascribed to maize across America).

Chapter 3 describes the history of the study of maize, beginning with a scan of ideas about the origins of agriculture in Old and New World archaeologies and then moving into the Beadle-Mangelsdorf dispute about whether maize stemmed from the wild teosinte found in Mexico and Guatemala or from an undiscovered or now-extinct 'wild maize'. This argument ran from 1939 for more than half a century, and was only resolved when plant genetics and DNA analyses showed that the Beadle/teosinte school was in essence correct. The other revelation came from AMS radiocarbon dating, which demonstrated that prior estimates of the antiquity of cultivated maize, notably those based on the work of Richard S. MacNeish in the Tehuacan Valley of central Mexico, were several millennia too old. Staller narrates all of this with good citation, although still with redundant passages that obscure an otherwise fascinating narrative of scientific history.

The last chapter is supposedly on interdisciplinary research, but again recycles much information from earlier sections. It also includes an incongruously detailed summary, complete with site plans and pottery profiles, of Staller's own recent work in southern Ecuador, albeit this has yielded useful evidence on maize use in the early second millennium BC. There is, however, an excellent discussion of phytolith evidence, especially relevant to the claimed ninth millennium BP use of maize in the Iguala valley of the Balsas basin in central Mexico (Piperno et al. 2009), the region in which maize is also thought to have had its genetic origin (Matsuoka et al. 2002). The mysteries of maize are well on the way to resolution, but there may be surprises yet.

References

MATSUOKA, Y., Y. VIGOUROUX, M.M. GOODMAN, J. SANCHEZ, E. BUCKLER & J. DOEBLEY. 2002. A single domestication for maize shown by multilocus microsatellite genotyping. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 99: 6080-84.

PIPERNO, D., A.J. RANERE, I. HOLST, J. IRIARTE & R. DICKAU. 2009. Starch grain and phytolith evidence for early ninth millennium B.P.. maize from the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 106: 5019-24.

STALLER, J.E., R.H. TYKOT & B.F. BENZ (ed.). 2006. Histories of maize: multidisciplinary approaches to the prehistory, linguistics, biogeography, domestication, and evolution of maize. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.

NORMAN HAMMOND

Department of Archaeology, Boston University, USA

(Email: ndch@bu.edu)