Tuber Cultivation and Tropes of Fragmentation in Mesoamerica

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.

Acts of deliberate fragmentation characterize tuber cultivation. Root plants rarely produce seeds, so new tubers develop by fragmenting the stem and inserting the severed portion into the ground, from which new tubers develop. Evidence of deliberate fragmentation likewise characterizes stone sculptures, ceramic figurines, and other objects produced during the Preclassic period. The trope of fragmentation also appears in broadly shared myths in which dismemberment, or partibility, was crucial to the creation of the world: breaking, and burying or returning fragments to the earth, was a prerequisite to making. We argue that acts of deliberate fragmentation, both for objects and tubers such as manioc, were viewed as germinative and crucial to the social and economic well-being of communities and that the trope of fragmentation provided a framework for practices both ceremonial and agricultural.

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): 38661.0