De quelites me como un taco: The Importance of Secondary-Growth Plants in Polyculture-Based Farming Strategies and Food Traditions at Etlatongo, Oaxaca

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Whenever we think of Mesoamerican foods, it is easy to imagine maize. It is particularly true during the Early Formative period, when the first sedentary villages appear in the region. Maize has been used almost exclusively to explain and understand early Mesoamerican diet and subsistence. This has left out a more comprehensive understanding of people’s foodways. In Etlatongo, an Early Formative community in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, the largest macrobotanical sampling for the period has been examined, and it provides both essential and new information about people’s foods beyond maize-centered views. Several types of plants, such as edible weeds, shrubs, and cacti, were identified. The evidence suggests that they were crucial to the community’s food traditions, as well as to the development of polyculture-based agroecological systems. These largely undervalued plant species for archaeologists were rather key to social and cultural development at Etlatongo, and their study offers more nuanced ways to understand one of Mesoamerica’s most significant episodes, the emergence of sedentary and sociopolitical complex societies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40295.0