NEW WORLD PREHISTORY — WILLEY 561 



Tamaulipas. Here, preserved plant remains were taken from the 

 refuse deposits of dry caves. In the Infiernillo phase, dating from 

 7000 to 5000 B.C., there are traces of domesticated squash {Cucurhita 

 pepo) and of possible domesticates of peppers, gourds, and small beans. 

 The cultural context is that of North American desert food collectors. 

 There are, in addition to flint implements, net bags of yucca and 

 maguey cords and woven baskets of a rod-foundation type. In the 

 succeeding Ocampo phase, from about 5000 to 3000 B.C., beans were 

 definitely domesticates. After this, between 3000 and 2000 B.C., a 

 primitive small-eared maize came into the sequence in the La Perra 

 and Flacco phases. K. S. MacNeish, who excavated and studied the 

 Tamaulipas caves, has estimated the composition of food refuse of the 

 La Perra phase to be as follows: 76 percent wild plants, 15 percent 

 animals, and 9 percent cultigens. The La Perra and Flacco artifact 

 inventories are not strikingly different from inventories of the earlier 

 phases, although they demonstrate a somewhat greater variety of 

 manufactures and an increased concern for seed foods. A few cen- 

 turies later, at about 1500 B.C., an archeological complex which is 

 representative of fully settled village farming appears in the region. 

 Thus, the Tamaulipas sequence offers a more or less unbroken story 

 of the very slow transition from food collecting supplemented with 

 incipient cultivation to the jDatterns of established cultivation [37]. 



Early and primitive maize is also found to the north of Tamaulipas, 

 actually outside of Nuclear America, in New Mexico. At Bat Cave, 

 corncobs from refuse of a Cochise-afRliated culture date between 3500 

 and 2500 B.C. [38]. This is as early as the La Perra maize, or even 

 earlier. 



As yet, neither archeologists nor botanists have been able to deter- 

 mme the exact center of origin for domestication of maize in the New 

 World, and it may be that this important event first took place in 

 northern Middle America and in southwestern North America, where 

 the intensive use of wild seeds in a food-collecting economy in a desert 

 area provided a favorable setting. There remains, nevertheless, the 

 very good possibility that a territory nearer the heart of Nuclear 

 America and more centrally situated for the spread of maize in the 

 hemisphere — an area such as southern Middle America — played tliis 

 primary role in the cultivation of maize. The great difficulty is, of 

 course, that the archeological record is so uneven, owing to the rarity 

 of sites and environments where such things as plant remains are pre- 

 served in the earth. Such findings have not yet been reported in 

 southern Middle America.* 



3 They have been reported recently (1961) from southern Pueblo, Mexico, by R. S. 

 MacNeish, who has found maize cobs, quite possibly of a wild variety, In cave refuse 

 estimated to be as early as, or earlier than, La Perra phase. (Personal communication, 

 R. S. MacNeish.) 



