492 FOOD PLANTS OF ANCIENT AMERICA. 



and everywhere in tropical America maize is still prepared for food 

 by ftiethods adapted to root crops, and not ground dry and made into 

 bread as a cereal, as among the Europeans who have colonized America. 

 The rough stone slab (metate) against which the primitive Indian had 

 rubbed his cassava and other farinaceous roots to a paste served also 

 for maize, which is first softened by soaking in water with lime or 

 ashes. The metate and the tortilla still hold their own in tropical 

 America. 



Like other species cultivated in the highlands of tropical America 

 most varieties of maize do not thrive in moist equatorial regions of 

 low elevations," so that it did not supplant the root crops, though 

 having a far wider distribution than any other plant cultivated by the 

 aborigines in pre-Spanish America. Nor did the utilization of maize 

 mark the limit of cereal cultures in America, though no small-seeded 

 crop of the New World compares in popularity with rice, wheat, barley, 

 rye, and oats. Even in Mexico, the supposed home of maize, the 

 seeds of Amaranthus and Salvia (chia) attained considerable economic 

 importance. In addition to their use as food, the latter were made to 

 furnish a demulcent drink' and an edible oil valued as an unguent and 

 in applying pigments, a series of functions closely parallel to those of 

 sesame, perhaps the most ancient of Old World herbaceous seed crops. 

 Wild seeds of many kinds were collected by the Indians of the United 

 States and Mexico, including wild rice (Zizania) and Uiu'ola, another 

 rice-like, aquatic grass of the shallow shore water of the Gulf of 

 California. In Chile there existed also several incipient cultures of 

 small-seeded plants, such as Madia, while the people of the bleak 

 plateaus of Peru and Bolivia had developed a unique cereal crop from 

 a pigweed {Ohenopodium qulnoa), another of many evidences of a 

 general tendency to agricultural civilization in ancient America.* 



"The varieties of maize cultivated, for example, by the Indians of Guatemala and 

 Peru are closely adapted to their different altitudes, only a few sorts yielding good 

 crops in the tropical lowlands. 



^ "It has been erroneously stated that maize was the only species of grain known 

 to the Americans before the conquest. In Chile, according to ^Molina, the inagcr, a 

 species of rye, and the liira, a species of barley, were both common before the 

 fifteenth century, and as there was neither rye nor liarley in pre-Spanish America it 

 is evident that if they wei'e common, even after the conquest, and not European 

 grain, they were indigenous. In Peru the bean (two or more si>ecies) and quinua 

 were common before the conquest, foi- 1 have frequently found them in the huacas, 

 preserved in vases of red earthenware." (Stevenson's Travels, Vol. I, pp. 336-367.) 



There are, however, many indigenous species of barley (Hordeum) in South 

 America, some seventeen being listed as valid in the liidej: Keircnsh. It is not 

 ini|iossilile that some of these were cultivated, or at least utilized, before the coming 

 of the Spaniards. It might have taken very little time for such a crop to be replaced 

 by biiilo>' brought from Europe. 



Quinua, like the root t'rops, is inedible when raw. It contjiins an extremely bitter 

 substance whicli has to be removed by long cooking, during which it is customary 

 to change the water eleven or twelve times. 



