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Maize reached the Southwest via an unknown route from Mexico. Its diffusion was relatively rapid. One theory is that the maize cultivation was carried northward from central Mexico by migrating farmers, most likely speakers of a Uto-Aztecan language. Another theory, more accepted among scholars, is that maize was diffused northward from group ...
Maize is a tropical crop first cultivated in Mexico several thousand years ago, which found its way northward to what is now the United States more than one thousand years ago. Maize agriculture began on the Great Plains by AD 900, initiating the Southern Plains villagers period of western Oklahoma and Texas.
Maize, or corn, was a relative latecomer to the Eastern Woodlands Cultures. The oldest known evidence of maize in what is now known as Mexico dates to 6700 BCE. [31] The oldest evidence of maize cultivation north of the Rio Grande in use is by about 2100 BCE at several locations in what later became Arizona and New Mexico. [32]
Maize starch can be hydrolyzed and enzymatically treated to produce high fructose corn syrup, a sweetener. [98] Maize may be fermented and distilled to produce Bourbon whiskey. [99] Corn oil is extracted from the germ of the grain. [100] In prehistoric times, Mesoamerican women used a metate quern to grind maize into cornmeal. After ceramic ...
Originally domesticated in Mesoamerica, maize transforms the Eastern Agricultural Complex. 400: Ancestral Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest weave extraordinarily long nets for trapping small animals and make yucca fibers into large sacks and bags.
Maize appears to have been the catalyst for change in the Late Prehistoric period in Iowa. While maize had been a minor crop in the Woodland Period, many archaeologists believe new varieties of maize were introduced to the region that produced higher yields, allowing for a population boom.
Guilá Naquitz Cave in Oaxaca, Mexico, is the site of early domestication of several food crops, including teosinte (an ancestor of maize), [1] squash from the genus Cucurbita, bottle gourds (Lagenaria siceraria), and beans.
Manos were used in prehistoric times to process wild seeds, nuts, and other food, generally used with greater frequency in the Archaic period, when people became more reliant upon local wild plant food for their diet. Later, Manos and metates were used to process cultivated maize. [3]