[Sca-cooks] mayan

[Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise]

Ok, from _Reconstructing the Mayan Diet_

"Although there is a great need for more research, these chapters tell 
us that although maize was the dominant staple, ancient Maya diets were 
far from simple." p xxii

"One of the earlier concepts of ancient Maya subsistence, a dietary 
pattern with heavy reliance on maize, beans, and squash, has indeed been 
borne out by the paleoethnobotanical record. " p 4

"The common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.), the second part of the 
Mesoamerican food triad, originally domesticated in two areas, Middle 
America and the Andes (Gepts and Debouck 1991), appeared in the Maya 
area sometime between 945 and 340 B.C. (Miksicek et al. 1991) and 
probably was introduced much earlier. " p. 5

"at the Cerén site in north-central El Salvador.1 Rapid deposition of
volcanic ash resulted in excellent preservation of plant parts at this
small farming village, which was inundated sometime around A.D. 600
(Sheets 1994)... Large handfuls of beans, both common beans (Phaseolus
vulgaris L.) and sieva beans (P. lunatus L.)  plus some wild relatives,
were found in ceramic vessels and other storage units. Because different
kinds of beans were mixed together, it appears that the Cerén farmers
were not very careful about separating varieties of the cultigen
(Lawrence Kaplan, personal communication 1996). Presumably, these mixed
collections would be cooked or sown together as well." p. 6 

Plant remains from Maya sites:
Agave sp.	agave
Mollugo verticillata	carpet weed
Anacardium occidentale	cashew
Astronium graveolens	frijolillo


-- --
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net "The tumult
and the shouting dies/ The captains and the kings depart And we are left
with large supplies / Of cold blancmange and
	rhubarb tart." -- Ronald Knox