Prelude

This book is about Teotihuacan, rather than all of Mesoamerica, but a brief historical overview can put Teotihuacan into context. Humans were in Mesoamerica by at least 11,000 BCE, having come from northeastern Asia. For millennia they lived as hunter-gatherers, collecting a variety of wild plant foods, hunting and trapping small game, and occasionally dining on very large animals, such as extinct kinds of elephants. We still know little about these early people because most Mesoamerican research has focused on later, pottery-making societies. Hunting and gathering ways of life were evidently quite satisfactory for a long time, but eventually, for reasons still not well understood, people in some parts of Mesoamerica began to spend part of their time not only harvesting wild plants, but also intervening in the life cycles of some species, most fatefully, into that of a grass called teosinte, the wild ancestor of maize (corn). These interventions amounted to domestication processes that led to new varieties or even new species that provided more food or other useful products per unit area, at the expense of greater human labor devoted to them and less time spent on wild resources. Besides maize, domesticated plants in Mesoamerica included various kinds of squashes and gourds (used for containers as well as for food), manioc from South America, beans, tomatoes, and less well-known grains such as the tiny but nutritious seeds of amaranths (a wide variety of leafy herbs). An early tree domesticate was the avocado. Many varieties of peppers were used for seasoning, and cacao “beans” for chocolate were highly prized. Magueys were used for food and other purposes, and their fermented sap made pulque. Prickly pears (nopales, genus Opuntia) provided tasty fruit and their leaves, stripped of spines, could also be prepared as food. Many other kinds of plants were used as vegetables, seasonings, and as medicines. Tobacco and other hallucinogenic substances were used for religious purposes.