Gift of the Gods: A Mashup of the History of Mesoamerican Avocados

Summary

This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The earliest avocados of the Americas were dispersed by extinct megafauna, and later by human populations, including Olmec, Maya, and Aztecs peoples. Prized for their flavor and rich caloric content, avocados were portrayed on Maya king’s tombs, served as the municipal symbol of ancient Mesoamerican cities, as a month in the Maya calendar, and were given as tribute to Maya and Aztec lords. While the Aztecs touted the plant’s curative and aphrodisiac properties, during the colonial period, the Spanish used the fruit as food for enslaved people on sugar plantations across their land holdings. In the early nineteenth century, the US Consul based in Campeche, Mexico, brought avocados to Florida, and by the mid-1900s, seedings were transported from Nicaragua and Mexico to California. This paper will discuss the development of the Mesoamerican avocado as a commodity, focusing in particular on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the role that amateur horticulturists played in establishing the crop in California.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35609.0