Culinary Arts and Plant Residues of the Ancient Maya Lowlands: Botanical Ingredients beyond Maize and Cacao

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.

Foraging, home gardening, and large-scale cultivation yielded products consumed at every level of ancient Maya societies, albeit in varying proportions. For decades, researchers have carefully documented miniscule botanical residues, from chemical signatures to visible seeds, through a number of analyses. Some plants have proven more visible than others, and/or of more interest than others; specialized foodstuffs like cacao and annual crops like maize, beans, and squash have received the lion's share of attention. In this paper, I discuss how these better-known food plants were complemented by geophyte crops like manioc and sweet potato, homegarden resources like achiote and nance, and foraged foods like hoja santa and hackberry. Ancient Maya people across the Lowlands used these plants to great culinary effect, and sometimes in artistic representation and sacred ceremony. We find a wealth of plants with diverse flavors and aromas, contributing to the sacred and the singular as much as the quotidian and the mundane.

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): 38063.0