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Hello, this is Professor Miguel Gutierrez, and this presentation is on Mesoamerica. What is Mesoamerica? It's a geographic region and cultural area which includes all or parts of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. This region has been the site of thousands of years of high civilization and tens of thousands of years of continuous human habitation. This region is also very important on a global level because it is one of the cradles of civilization on the planet.
What that means is that, along with other cradles of civilization like Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, and the Andean highlands, it is one of the places on the planet where civilization first emerged. These first civilizations were characterized by, among other things, large cities, writing, agriculture, public works, monumental architecture, etc. In this map of Mesoamerica, indicated by the green shading, you can see that the largest part of Mesoamerica is in modern-day Mexico, even though it does not include all of Mexico. Mesoamerica runs from central Mexico southward through most of Central America, but not including Panama.
Here is a short and very limited list of just some of the accomplishments of Mesoamericans in the last several thousands of years. There's way too many to go into any significant details in this short PowerPoint. These aren't necessarily the most impressive accomplishments or the ones of the greatest magnitude, but just a few things to keep in mind when we consider the character of Mesoamerican civilization. If you're interested in knowing more about the items on the list or countless more, please consider doing your own research or taking a course on this. We could easily talk for the rest of the semester just on this topic. These are just a few examples that point to a much larger understanding of the world.
First, much has been said about Mesoamericans and their vast understanding of astronomy. One of the things that have caught my attention is that Mesoamericans apparently had made observations on what today is referred to as axial precession, which you can think of as a wobble in the Earth's rotation, like a top that is running out of energy and starts to slowly wobble on its axis. This wobble is not easy to see; in fact, it takes about 26,000 years for the Earth to complete one full circle, one entire wobble, if you will. At this rate, you could see a very minute change in the night sky over the course of many, many years. A circle has 360 degrees, so that would mean that the night sky would seem to shift just one degree over 72 years. It would take an entire lifetime for the sky to barely change; that's not generally perceptible unless you are really doing some hardcore observations and calculations. You would also have to devote massive amounts of time, thought, and energy into developing observatories, instruments, records, and schools so that each generation could build on the work of others.
Similarly, the Mesoamerican calendars used some of the observations from astronomy to formulate an astonishingly accurate system of time-keeping throughout thousands of years. In fact, the calendars used by the native people of Mesoamerica were far more accurate than the Julian calendar, which was the one being used by the Europeans at the time of the conquest in the late 1400s and 1500s. When you consider that even the Gregorian calendar, which is the one that we use today, is still inaccurate because it's off by about six hours each year, which adds up to a whole day off every four years—that's what a leap year is supposed to fix—it's amazing that the Mayans were able to devise a calendar thousands of years ago that could accurately predict the winter solstice in our age. In fact, some of you might remember that people were freaking out about the world possibly ending back in December 21st of 2012 because of misinterpretations of the Mayan calendar.
Those of you that have ever been to any of the temples or pyramids in Mexico or Central America know that the architecture of the Mesoamericans is pretty mind-blowing. Just consider that these massive pyramids are still standing and in fairly good shape today. When you also consider what it takes to plan and construct these buildings, especially without draft animals like horses and cattle, which the Mesoamericans did not have, it becomes even more impressive. Also, these buildings and cities are precisely aligned with some celestial happening, which coincide symbolically with Mesoamerican religions. Just about every aspect of these buildings has a special meaning behind it. If you have not seen any of these in person, I would encourage you to go and see them. The picture that you have here is Teotihuacan, which was built about 2,000 years ago, and it's an incredibly impressive city.
Of course, all of the evidence and the accomplishments in astronomy, the calendar, and architecture all definitively mean that the Mesoamerican civilizations were phenomenally well-versed in complex mathematics. It's not possible to do the above-mentioned feats and not have a far-reaching understanding of math. Just as really basic examples, it's fairly common knowledge that the Mayans came up with the concept of zero independently of other world civilizations. Mathematicians have also pointed out that, in order to successfully compute the dimensions of the massive pyramids, the ancients must have also had an understanding of pi (3.14). Those of you that have said that Mexicans can't do math, you should reconsider.
One example in the area of medical science is in a book called the Badiano's Manuscript. Seen here is a page from that book. The book was written by the Mexica, or the Aztecs, as they are frequently referred to. The book itself has an amazing story. In the book, the authors outlined dozens of cures for common ailments. They not only identify the medicinal plant but also tell you how to prepare the plant so you can use it for the intended cure. Some of the analyses of the book's contents have concluded that, in the field of medicine, the Mesoamericans had, at the very least, a comparable understanding to European doctors of that same time period. They say that it's at least, if not surpassing, European understanding of medicine at that time.
Finally, in the area of agriculture, we have a lot of foods that you are familiar with, like the ones shown here: chiles, aguacates, jitomates, and tomatillos; corn, calabacitas, cacao, chocolate beans; and these are just a few, just a very short list of the plants that were domesticated and developed in Mesoamerica for thousands of years. Mexicans and Central Americans have been enjoying these items, which they created, for hundreds of generations. This has been in their culture, in Mesoamerican culture, for thousands of years. I'm going to focus on one crop in particular, which is very important in Mesoamerican culture, which is corn. So when I refer to corn, maize, or maize, I'm talking about the same crop.
I'd like to start by telling you a couple of stories about corn, and the first question that we have to address with this crop is: where in the world does corn grow wild? And the answer to that is kind of a phenomenal answer, which is nowhere. Corn doesn't grow wild anywhere. Just about every plant that you can think of grows naturally somewhere on the planet, but not corn. And so if it doesn't grow naturally in the wild, then we have to shift the question: where and when was it developed, and by who? In other words, this crop was created by someone or a group of people at a point in history. It was developed in what is today called Mexico, sometime around seven to ten thousand years ago. But how did that happen? How do these people actually create a new crop? And the general answer is that, first and foremost, thousands of years ago the ancient Mesoamericans had an intimate and robust understanding of botany, biology, genetics, and everything that goes along with that, including mutations, and they also had an understanding of what today we call artificial selection. Artificial selection is when human beings select for desired traits; they see certain characteristics which they like in a species and then try to pass on those characteristics on to future generations of the species. It's the way humans have derived countless domestic dog breeds from wild wolves. It's different than natural selection, where nature simply runs its course and where certain traits are selected for naturally without human intervention. Those traits are adaptations which gave a species an advantage in their natural habitat. So in the case of corn, this is not a plant that developed naturally on its own. Human beings, around 10,000 years ago, started selecting certain traits in this plant, and consequently they developed it into what it is today.
So what was their starting point? Their starting point is a plant called teosinte, or teosinte. This plant still appears throughout Mesoamerica today, but if you would see it today you would just think that it looks like some sort of grass, which is true. Teosinte is a grass; corn is a grass. So thousands of years ago the ancient Mesoamericans ran into this plant, and they saw some potential in it to develop it into something different. And in this insert on the right, you can see what a quote-unquote "corn cob" would have looked like. It's incredibly small, but if you start selecting for certain traits and pay close attention to mutations, you can, little by little, over the course of thousands of years, start to modify this plant. And so here you have, on the left, what teosinte looks like compared to a U.S. quarter, and modern corn on the right, with a modern corn cob in relation to a U.S. quarter. This is actually the same plant that has been developed and subjected to artificial selection for thousands of years, to the point where you have an almost unrecognizably different-looking plant.
The most common way of consuming corn in Mesoamerica for thousands of years, and even today, is not by eating elotes, not by eating corn on the cob, but by consuming corn products such as tortillas. So what are the ingredients for tortillas? Well, we can guess that the main ingredient is, of course, corn, and of course you would have water, and there's only one more ingredient. Tortillas, for thousands of years, have only really had three ingredients, and I'm fascinated by how many people don't know what they are. I get a lot of wrong guesses when we do this in class. People incorrectly guess that it has flour, or sugar, or salt, or lard. Lard, as we know today, would not have been available to the ancient Mesoamericans because they did not have domesticated pigs. Pigs, cows, horses, and other livestock were introduced to the Americas by Europeans in the late 1400s and 1500s. So no, they do not have manteca; they do not have lard. The third ingredient is lime. In Spanish, they refer to this as cal. Now when I say lime, I'm not talking about a citrus lime; make sure you do not think that lemons are part of the recipe here. I'm talking about this chemical called calcium hydroxide. The consistency, when you touch it, is just like a chalky powder. So those are the ingredients for making tortillas. You boil the three together, and it turns into a new product called nixtamal. You can't just call it corn anymore; it's something different; it's nixtamal.
Now these are really groundbreaking ideas the Mesoamericans had a very long time ago. They create corn, their own crop, and then they develop all these methods of growing it, cultivating it, harvesting it, cooking it, processing it, and making all kinds of foods out of it. In the picture on the right, you have what's called a metate; it's a grinding stone where you grind the boiled corn and come up with this masa, this nixtamal masa. This is one of the foundations of Mesoamerican cooking. What can you make out of this masa? You can make all kinds of stuff; you can make tortillas, obviously, gorditas, pupusas, and all of the other similar foods. You can slightly modify the masa for tamales; you can make atoles, which are the corn-based drinks, and a whole lot more.
So here's another element of the story about corn. Corn, outside of the Americas, has a very interesting story. Nobody on Earth had ever seen corn outside of the Americas until 1492, when Christopher Columbus gets lost and arrives by accident in the Americas. He gets off his boat, and he sees all kinds of things that he had never seen before, and one of them is this crop called maize. So he takes it back to Europe, and it eventually becomes very popular over there. Europeans grow it, eat it, and find corn so valuable as a food source to the extent that many people, especially poor people, came to rely on corn as a primary source of food. However, something went awry among populations that heavily relied on corn; they started getting these diseases, and from the descriptions that we have of their symptoms, modern nutritionists know exactly what they're referring to. But just think for a second: why would people outside of the Americas start getting sick from eating a lot of corn? Because this question boggled European doctors for a while. We can take some guesses as to why they're getting sick: maybe the soil in Europe is not adequate to grow corn; maybe Europeans are displaying a food allergy to a food product that they have never had before. Well, what we know today is that what they were experiencing are actually vitamin deficiencies. The picture on the right is called pellagra, which is a niacin, or vitamin B3, deficiency, shown here by inflammation of the skin that looks like sores; and the one on the left is kwashiorkor, which is a protein deficiency, especially among children, when they get enough calories but not enough protein, and they show these protruding bellies, among other symptoms. These diseases happened, and still happen to some extent, in many places where there were people who heavily relied on corn as their primary food, but these diseases generally were not happening in Mesoamerica, which is odd—that the people in the Americas, who have so many corn dishes and consume so much corn, would be fine, and other people will eat a lot of corn and get sick. Why are they getting sick? There's two main reasons. The first one is a balanced diet. When nutritionists and doctors tell you about the importance of a balanced diet, that's not just a loose suggestion; that is very important. If you completely cut a vitamin or mineral out of your intake, you can get terribly sick, and it could possibly even lead to your death. As popular as corn has been in Mesoamerica, the people there were not consuming exclusively corn. Mesoamericans have this phenomenal variety in diet, and they've had a tradition of that for thousands of years, and we still do today. If you would go to my grandma's kitchen on any given day—she's 96 years old in Mexico—there's always a variety of dishes. She's not rich by any means; she lives in a rural place in the countryside, in the rancho, but there's always frijoles, tortillas, along with several other, mostly plant-based, dishes, like nopales or papas, or whatever. A balanced diet is heavily embedded in the culinary practices of Mesoamerica. So first and foremost, these people in Europe were not eating a balanced diet; they were consuming mostly or exclusively corn. That's not good. You can take the most nutritious thing on the planet, but if that's all you eat, you're gonna get sick.
The second reason of why people outside of the Americas got sick, but not Mesoamericans, is an ironic story. I mentioned that one of the diseases common among people that eat almost exclusively corn is called pellagra, caused by a niacin deficiency. Well, it turns out that corn has niacin in it, along with a whole bunch of other vitamins and minerals. So how are you suffering from a niacin deficiency when all you eat is corn, which has niacin in it? And the answer to that is bioavailability, which means that the niacin inside of the corn is there, but your body, for some reason, can't absorb it, and it goes right through you. So why wasn't that happening in Mesoamerica? You remember this slide, the ancient recipe for tortillas? It turns out that the way to make those vitamins inside of corn available to your body is by cooking the corn in an alkali solution; you have to change the pH of the water in which it's boiling. The risen pH, in essence, unlocks the nutrients, and now your body can use them. How do you change the pH of water to make it more alkaline? Well, an easy way is by adding cal, lime. So when Europeans started cooking corn, they decided to skip a step; they were cooking corn, but they were not making nixtamal. They were doing this, and that little omitted step made a big difference in the people's health; they were losing out on all the nutritional value corn had to offer. Even today, there's a word in English, as odd as it might sound, nixtamalization—no joke; this is a real word. Nixtamalization refers to boiling corn in an alkali solution. It's somewhat of a standard in the modern food production industry, for tortilla chips and stuff like that, to boil corn and cal because it's much more nutritious that way. But let's not forget this is the technology that Mesoamericans discovered and developed thousands of years ago. And so we have a very pressing and provocative question: how and why did the ancient Mesoamericans come to put cal in the nixtamal? There's a lot of articles out there that speculate that this was all an accident; I don't quite agree with that. At some point it may have been an accident, but eventually it became standardized all throughout Mesoamerica and extended to other parts of the Americas as well. When an accident happens and you're not really paying attention, it just remains an accident, but when an accident happens and you are observant, receptive, and analytical, it becomes a discovery. So if there was an accident made at one point, these people were savvy enough to figure out that there was some value to it. To say it was a mistake downplays the countless interventions by our ancestors in developing this very important discovery. The story is a lot longer than this, and I have a lot more to say on this topic and the development of nixtamal. If you're interested in talking more about this, just ask me in class. But suffice it to say for now that what this all suggests is a people that really valued exploration, scientific endeavors, their own nutrition, and that they had lots of time to experiment and look for ways for bettering and developing themselves.
So let's look a bit at who exactly were the Mesoamericans. We have a huge challenge today in the United States, in the 21st century, overcoming the idea that most of us have about what it must have been like to live in Mesoamerica 500 or a thousand years ago. When we think about these ancient Mesoamericans, we think of, like, the movie Apocalypto, or any other similar depiction; we think of butt-naked Indians running through the jungle trying not to get eaten by a jaguar or trying not to get killed by other Indians; they must have had a horrible existence. We have really got to start thinking differently, because the evidence that we have says that that's not what was generally happening in Mesoamerica. But through movies and other media representations, that's all we really see of these people. So yeah, let's get rid of that. The evidence we have is of people that have placed a high premium on scientific exploration, intellectual development, critical observation, creativity, adaptation, and hard work. So yes, we have a very distorted image of the ancient Mesoamericans. If you are Mexican or Central American, if that's your ancestry, then that also means you have a very distorted view of yourself. These are not passive people; these are people that are taking a very active role in shaping the world, while still maintaining a respectful and reciprocal relationship with all of creation. And I must emphasize the key words here are reciprocal relationships. It's a bit beyond the scope of this presentation, but this is consistent with Native America in general—that Native American religions and spiritualities, Native American worldviews and philosophies, very much emphasize relationships where you give and you receive, where you reciprocate, where you are in balance in your relationships. The ancient Mesoamericans, even though they were acting on the world and creating all of these different plants and foods and structures and so on, at the very forefront of their understanding of their place in the world is reciprocal relationships with all of creation.
So perhaps the most important question is: why should we care? Why should we even look at this idea of Mesoamerica today? Here's a few really quick points. At the beginning of every semester, when we do in-person classes, I ask students: what reasons do Mexicans, Central Americans, and the so-called Latinos have to be proud of themselves? What are some points of pride for them? The most popular answer is a very redundant answer, where people say Mexicans should be proud because they come from a proud people. Well, that doesn't tell me anything; give me a specific thing that's special about your group of people. And it's fascinating and tragic that most Mexicans and Central Americans that I've talked to don't seem to be aware that they come from people that first invented civilization on the planet. That's something we should all know, and a pretty good reason to be proud. We are coming from cultures that have been in development for thousands of years. These civilizations made contributions way beyond Native America; they contributed to humanity in general. When you just think about foodstuffs that are important everywhere in the...
World, how many of those came from Mesoamerica? A whole bunch: tomatoes, the squash family (pumpkins, calabasitas), chiles, corn, chocolate, vanilla beans. These were all domesticated by Mesoamerican ingenuity, and these are all contributions to the world.
This is extra problematic when the modern descendants of the ancient Mesoamericans don't know about these achievements. Because in the United States, we are bombarded with a narrative that says that Mexicanos and Centro Americanos have no valuable contributions to the United States or to anyone; that we don't do anything good for this country besides take welfare and other nonsense like that.
There are some politicians, like Republican Steve King from Iowa, who has repeatedly attacked Mexican and Central American immigrants and said that non-whites have not contributed to civilization. If somebody tells you that your people have never contributed and are not valuable, and you don't know about this Mesoamerican stuff, you might be tempted to believe them, or at least don't know how to defend yourself. The ridiculous irony is that Steve King was a representative for Iowa, the leading corn producer in the United States—it's sometimes even called the "Corn State." King and his Republican friends must be under the delusion that white men created corn.
We have to know about these contributions and accomplishments generally. Finally, there is a nasty and tenacious attitude that Europeans brought civilization to the Americas; that they civilized the Mexican, Centro Americanos, and other indigenous peoples. That is flatly wrong. There were already civilizations here in the Western Hemisphere for thousands of years before it was happening in Europe. But if you choose to believe this myth, in any way, shape, or form—that is, you believe that Europeans civilized the native people here—then you, at some level, believe that colonization was a good thing.
So, if you want to have an honest conversation about colonization and decolonization, you have to first acknowledge the greatness and the impressive nature of Mesoamerica and Native America overall. You had to understand who you were before you were colonized; otherwise, there is no decolonization. Otherwise, colonization doesn't sound so bad, because these "good Europeans" civilized these backwards, but naked, Indians. Remember that Europeans came for our goods, not for our good.
For the last slide, just a question for you to consider: In what ways can we still see the legacy of ancient Mesoamerican civilizations as a living culture today? You should not assume that Mesoamerican culture died under Cortés and the conquistadores in 1521. Not true. There, there's many, many elements that, for thousands of years, have been prevailing here in North America, and they're still here with us today. You should make it a point to understand what those things are. Many of the core elements of what we consider modern Mexican or Central American culture are actually rooted in ancient Mesoamerican practices, whether it's the things you cook and the way you cook them, or the way you interact with your families, the things you say, the way you pray, the festivals you celebrate. Many of those things point to a Mesoamerican living culture that is still here with us today.
Thank you.