When corn was king, semiarid farm lands were supposed to be the place of its origin. Spinden saw “irrigation as an invention which accounts for the very origin of agriculture itself.”[5] Semiarid land, however, is notoriously hard to clear; though its plants are few, they have deep, tenacious roots. River flood plains of the Sonoran desert in Mexico—ideal by Spinden’s standard—yield no evidence of long or extensive occupation, according to Carl Sauer. Where irrigation was used in our Southwest, dates are not early. The evidence of the plants themselves, he writes, “overwhelmingly points not to desert or steppe but to several humid climates for their origin.”[6]
There has never been much enthusiasm for the humid tropic lowlands as the seedbed of agriculture. Of late years the students of botany have turned to the temperate forest area and particularly to the mountain valley as the seat of agriculture. This has been championed by N. I. Vavilov and a group of Russian scientists, sent to the Americas in the 1920’s, who made a most elaborate study of our native cultivated plants. Much of their evidence is too technical for presentation here, but their conclusions have seemed convincing to many students.[7] A mountain valley provides a wider range of temperature and rainfall and a greater variety of native plants. Its forest trees, before they are cleared by girdling and burning, store up a rich humus under their shade. Costa Rica and El Salvador—full of isolated mountain valleys—contain, according to Henry J. Bruman, as many species of plants as the United States, in spite of the fact that the United States is a hundred times the size of the two countries together.[8] The Russians believe that agriculture took early shape in certain mountain valley areas, including southern Mexico, Central America, Colombia, highland Peru, western Bolivia, and southern Chile. Though they do not commit themselves as to whether agriculture originated in one place and spread later to others, “their evidence,” Sauer thinks, “may be interpreted in favor of multiple independent beginnings.”[9] But Bruman, writing of their work, points out that the “enormous spread of maize and beans, of cotton and tobacco, for example, shows that there is ‘something of the undivided whole’ in the great cultures of the New World, as Vavilov well expresses it.”[10] Richard S. MacNeish, an archaeologist who spent at least a dozen years on the matter, declared in 1960, “There were multiple origins of New World domesticated plants, at different times.”[11]
It is amusing to note that the diffusionists and the partisans of independent invention change places on the subject of corn. Spinden diffuses all corn from Middle America. Gladwin plumps for various areas of independent invention, including the Mississippi Valley.[12]
The Indian’s Accomplishment in Agriculture
There can be no argument over the remarkable nature of certain things that the Indian farmer accomplished. Through long cultivation he produced the seedless pineapple. When he found that one form of manioc was poisonous, he took thought and devised a press for squeezing out the deadly cyanide while retaining the starch. Bruman calls this “one of the outstanding accomplishments of the American Indian.”[13] He says further:
The original process of plant selection seems to have been carried on more intensively in the Americas than elsewhere. The major crop plants were farther removed from their wild ancestors than those of any other part of the earth at the time of the discovery. Mention need only be made of corn, which is so distinct as to require classification in a unique genus, and of the potato, which resulted probably from the crossing of many and various Solanaceae.
[The Solanaceae include nightshade, jimson weed, tobacco, and others.] It is ironic that, as O. F. Cook has observed, the white potatoes grown each year are worth more than all the gold that the Spaniards took from the Incas.[14] This is probably still truer of Indian corn.
THE FIRST ILLUSTRATION OF THE CORN PLANT
From Fuch’s De Historia Stirpium, published in 1542, only fifty years after Columbus’s men first saw maize. Seven years earlier, Oviedo printed a drawing of an ear of corn. (Courtesy of Harvard University Library.)