Manioc Cultivation at Ceren, El Salvador: Occasional Kitchen Garden Plant or Staple Crop?

Abstract

Many scholars have thought the Classic period Maya did not cultivate the root crop manioc, while others have suggested it may have been an occasional cultigen in kitchen gardens. For many decades there was no reliable evidence that the ancient Maya cultivated manioc, but in the 1990s manioc pollen from the late Archaic was found in Belize, and somewhat older pollen was found in Tabasco. At about the same time of those discoveries, research within the Ceren village, El Salvador, encountered occasional scattered manioc plants that had grown in mounded ridges in kitchen gardens. These finds adjacent to households indicated manioc was not a staple crop, and vastly inferior to maize and beans in food volume produced. However, 2007 research in an agricultural area 200 m south of the Ceren village encountered intensive formal manioc planting beds. If manioc was widely cultivated in ancient times, its impressive productivity, ease of cultivation even in poor soils, and drought resistance suggest it might have been a staple crop helping to support dense Maya populations in the southeast periphery and elsewhere.

The role of infield agriculture in Maya cities

“…This explanation fits well with current views of Maya agriculture, which have transformed over the past five decades from simplistic models of swidden farming to much more sophisticated models of diverse subsistence strategies and technologies (e.g. Puleston, 1968;Harrison and Turner, 1978;Flannery, 1982;Turner and Harrison, 1983;Fedick, 1996;Sheets et al, 2011;Dahlin et al, 2005;Robin, 2012).…”

Agricultural origins from the ground up: Archaeological approaches to plant domestication

“…For example, at the Cerén site in El Salvador, an ancient Mayan village was preserved intact under a blanket of volcanic ash and magma. Due to these exceptional taphonomic conditions, paleoethnobotanists were able to identify the species of grass used in thatched roofs (Lentz et al, 1996), and entire manioc field systems were uncovered (Sheets et al, 2011).…”

Is it agriculture yet? Intensified maize-use at 1000 cal BC in the Soconusco and Mesoamerica

“…It has long been proposed that manioc or other root crops could have provided a significant source of carbohydrates (e.g., Bronson, 1966;Coe, 1961;Lowe, 1967: 59, 128;Lowe, 1975: 10-14; see also Clark et al, , 2010. This is a likely possibility, especially given the importance of manioc as a staple crop during the Classic period (Sheets et al, 2011(Sheets et al, , 2012 and its documentation at some Formative (Hather and Hammond, 1994) and Archaic period (Pohl et al, 1996;Rosenswig et al, 2014) sites in the Maya area. Further, Cyphers et al (2013; see also Cyphers and Zurita-Noguera, 2012) propose that manioc was the primary source of cultivated carbohydrates for the inhabitants of San Lorenzo during the polity's late Early Formative period florescence.…”