Latin American Farming

Foraging to Farming

Primal, primitive, primordial, all great words to describe the idea of the hunter-gatherer stage humanity was once in; After all, animals to this day are still following this method to the T. Thankfully we can use these words to describe the times when things weren’t so technologically advanced and a great deal of that credit should be given to our Mesoamerican ancestors for thinking outside the box. As one can imagine, so many things have to fall in place to really live off of farming and others have to be willed into motions.

For anyone who has ever tried to grow even the simplest of plants, they know nothing comes easy. For any farming certain conditions have to be right in order to farm and farm right. The land has to be able to cultivate a list of different plants, the seasons must be able to stagger cropping in order to live off of crops year-round, and you should have different land types around to generate trade and get the most out of all types of food. Historian MacNeish of Boston University’s Archeology department notes, both the Tehaucan Valley of Mexico and the Ayacucho Valley of Peru were richly provided with these conditions. Central Mexico was rich in it’s providence in a plethora of crops like: Wild maize, mixta squashes, pumpkins, chilli peppers, white and sweet potatoes, beans, peanuts and much more. The conditions were given to the Mesoamerican people. Their land was prosperous, the variety of food was good enough to cultivate in different seasons, and the fluctuation of different areas allowed for great trade options. Now came the hard part.

Willed was the word used before to describe what the Mesoamericans had to do in order for farming to solely support the people. Probably the most willed cropped to this day started back in Central Mexico and went by the name Maize, and now known as corn. Similar to the process of Domesticating a Animal, which