BOTANICAL MUSEUM LEAFLETS 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
CampripGr, Massacuusetrts, SEPTEMBER 8, 1967 Voi. 22, No. 1 
BAT CAVE REVISITED 
BY 
Paut C. Mancetsporr, HERBERT W. Dick 
AND JULIAN CAMARA-HERNANDEZ* 
In 1948 an expedition sponsored by the Peabody Mu- 
seum of Harvard University and led by Mr. Herbert 
Dick, then a graduate student, uncovered many cobs and 
other parts of maize from the accumulated refuse in a 
once-inhabited rock shelter in New Mexico known as 
Bat Cave. These prehistoric remains were significant in 
several respects: (1) they were the first remains dis- 
covered which showed clearly the nature of primitive 
maize; (2) they provided tangible evidence of a well 
defined evolutionary sequence; (3) they represented the 
first archaeological evidence showing: (A) that primitive 
maize was both a popcorn and a form of pod corn, (B) 
that maize did not originate from teosinte, (C) that much 
of the variation in modern maize is the product of intro- 
gression from teosinte (Mangelsdorf and Smith, 1949). 
Since the 1948 expedition had excavated only one sec- 
tion of the eave, Mr. Dick in 1950 made a second ex- 
pedition which excavated additional sections in the hope 
of finding still older vegetal remains. A_ preliminary 
* The authors are respectively Fisher Professor of Natural History, 
Harvard University; Associate Professor of Anthropology, Adams 
State College, Alamosa, Colorado; and Fellow of the Consejo Nacional 
de Investigaciones Cientificas y Técnicas de la Argentina. 
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