Water management and climate change in ancient Maya city

Topic: Mayan Water System

I wonder just how this system impacted their agriculture although the article does not mention it. I will be looking for more on this subject in the future.

Water management and climate change in ancient Maya city#.T3envb45FTQ.email.

Original article

sciencedaily

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Cincinnati, via Newswise. The original article was written by Dawn Fuller.

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Study suggests ancient Peruvians ‘ate popcorn’

Topic Ancient popcorn

 

Popcorn

 

A new study suggests that people living along the coast of northern Peru were eating popcorn 1,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Researchers say corncobs found at an ancient site in Peru suggest that the inhabitants used them for making flour and popcorn.

Scientists from Washington’s Natural History Museum say the oldest corncobs they found dated from 4700BC.

They are the earliest ever discovered in South America.

Ancient food

The curator of New World archaeology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, Dolores Piperno, says maize was first domesticated in Mexico nearly 9,000 years ago from a wild grass.

Ms Piperno says that her team’s research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that only a few thousand years later maize arrived in South America, where it evolved into different varieties now common in the Andean regions.

Her team discovered the maize in the archaeological sites of Paredones and Huaca Prieta.

“This evidence further indicated that in many areas corn arrived before pots did, and that early experimentation with corn as a food was not dependent on the presence of pottery,” Ms Piperno explained.

She says that at the time, though, maize was not yet an important part of their diet.

Original Article:

bbc.co.uk

Jan 18, 2012

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Over 1,000-year-old Maya royal kitchen found in south-east Mexico

Image via Wikipedia

Topic: Myan Kitchen

Mexico City – Archaeologists on Thursday were still  digesting this week’s announcement of the discovery of a royal  kitchen from the time of the Mayas in the Kabah archaeological area,  in the south-eastern Mexican state of Yucatan.

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH),  which announced the finding late Wednesday, said a large number of  pots, stone artifacts and other materials were found in the area,  along with evidence of fires.

The kitchen is believed to have been 40 metres long and 14 metres  wide, and researchers date it at 750-950 AD, when the pre-Hispanic  town of Kabah was in its prime. There is however evidence of a human  presence in the area as early as 300 BC, the INAH said.

The Codz-Poop (or Palace of Masks);

 

 

The kitchen is believed to have been part of a palace.

‘We think large quantities of food were cooked in palaces, which  is why utensils were larger, there were more of them and they had  varied shapes for different uses,’ said archaeologist Lourdes  Toscano.

Toscano said researchers were struck by the absence of animal  bones at the site, which led them to believe that waste was taken  elsewhere. Archaeologists plan to study the traces of organic matter  they did find, however, to find out what food was eaten by the  community.

Original article:

monstersandcritics.com

Nov 17, 2011

 

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Scientists Uncover Clues to How the Classic Maya Sustained Their Dense Populations | Popular Archaeology – exploring the past

Topic: Ancient Maya agricultural practices.

Scientists Uncover Clues to How the Classic Maya Sustained Their Dense Populations | Popular Archaeology – exploring the past.

Original article:

populararchaeology

Sep 2011

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9,000 Year Old Tools Found in Mexico

Topic: Early tools

201110227432 | 9,000 Year Old Tools Found in Mexico.

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Cooking Ancient Recipes

Topic: Recipes

This is an article on different foods cooked in the ancient world. it was published in 2004, I had been meaning to present it earlier but like so many writers this article got lost in my clutter. Enjoy!

Cooking Ancient Recipes.

Original article:

archaeology.org

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It’s Official! Team Confirms Sunflower Domesticated in US, Not Mexico

Topic: Sunflowers

 

It’s Official! Team Confirms Sunflower Domesticated in US, Not Mexico.

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We have Columbus to thank for lager beer

Topic More on Beer

Orange-colored galls, such as these pictured in 2010, from the beech tree forests of Patagonia have been found to harbor the yeast that makes lager beer possible. Five hundred years ago, in the age of sail and when the trans-Atlantic trade was just beginning, the yeast somehow made its way from Patagonia to the caves and monastery cellars of Bavaria where the first lager beers were fermented.

If you like lager beer, you have Christopher Columbus to thank for it. The
long-standing mystery of where the yeast that makes cold-temperature lager beer
fermentation possible has been solved, in the beech forests of Patagonia
in Argentina.

Humans have been making beer for a very long time. The first actual
evidence we have is barley beer 6,000 years ago in Sumeria, which was probably
somewhat like a thin, fermented, drinkable gruel. In Europe, the same yeast
types used to make bread and wine were used to make ale-type beers,
a process that was well-established by the Middle Ages.

But in the 15th century, something remarkable happened in Bavaria. Beers stored in the cold, dank caves and cellars there,
often by monks, began to ferment. A new type of slow-growing, cold-tolerant
yeast had found its way into the area, making bottom-fermenting beer type
possible for the first time.

Lager has since become so widespread that it is now the most popular
technique for producing alcoholic beverages, with over $250 billion in global
sales in 2008.

The yeast that made all this possible was called Saccharomyces pastorianus, which was a fusion of a
well-known ale-yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae and some other, unknown,
cold-tolerant yeast.

However much scientists searched, they couldn’t find the other half of the
yeast fusion in the wild. They looked at the more than 1,000 yeast species known
and found no match. It didn’t appear to exist in anywhere in Europe.

But now an international team of researchers have discovered the home ground
of this magical yeast that has made so many sporting events so much more
enjoyable

It comes from the beech forests of Patagonia, the alpine region at the tip of
South America, they report in this week’s edition of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences. The yeast lives in galls
that infect the trees there and is a 99.5% match for the ‘missing link’ half of
the lager yeast.

They named the newfound yeast Saccharomyces eubayanus.

“Beech galls are very rich in simple sugars. It’s a sugar rich habitat that
yeast seem to love,” Chris Todd Hittinger, a University of Wisconsin-Madison genetics
professor and a co-author of the study, said in a release.

In fact, the yeast is so active in the galls that they spontaneously ferment.
“When over mature, they fall all together to the (forest) floor where they often
form a thick carpet that has an intense ethanol odor, most probably due to the
hard work of our new Saccharomyces eubayanus,” Diego Libkind of the Institute for Biodiversity
and Environment Research in Bariloche, Argentina, said.

Somehow, and no one knows exactly how, this New World yeast got to Europe
just as the Columbian exchange between Europe and the Americas was
beginning. Perhaps beech wood from Argentina was used to make something that
ended up in a monastery. However it happened, it made its way to where beer was
brewed. And the rest, beer lovers have cause to be grateful for, was
history.

Or as the researchers put it rather more dryly:

The facile recovery of this species from Patagonia suggests that S.
eubayanus may have been absent in Europe until it was imported from
overseas after the advent of trans-Atlantic trade.

Original article:

By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY

8/22/2011

usatoday.com

This illustration depicts the journey of lager yeast from Patagonia at the southern tip of South America to Europe 500 years ago.

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Peruvian Desert Breadbasket

Topic : Ancient Peruvian agriculture practices

 

The coastal desert of Peru. (Wikimedia Commons)

 
What do the characters in The Grapes of Wrath, Icelandic shepherds in the Middle Ages and ancient Peruvians have in common? They all suffered from the effects of intensive agriculture on sensitive environments.

Throughout human history unsustainable agricultural practices have turned fragile ecosystems into wastelands and left people starving. During the Dust Bowl, American farmers learned the consequences of removing the deep rooted grasses from the Great Plains when the soil blew away in tremendous dust storms. Icelandic shepherds learned that the sheep rearing practices their ancestors used on the European mainland destroyed the thin soils of their island and left them with starving herds and little to eat.

The ancient inhabitants of what is now Peru also learned the unhappy consequences of farming in a delicate ecosystem. The Ica Valley, near the coast of southern Peru and the famous Nazca lines, is now a barren desert, but was once a fertile floodplain, anchored by the roots of the huarango tree.

People were able to raise a variety of crops there for several centuries. But intensive agriculture in pre-conquest times led to ecosystem collapse. The history of the land was recently reconstructed by bioarcheologist David Beresford-Jones of the University of Cambridge by looking at plant remains left in ancient garbage heaps.

Beresford-Jones and a team of archeologists studied plant remains associated with settlement sites spanning roughly 750 B.C. to 1000 A.D. They observed the change as the valley inhabitants went from eating mostly gathered foods, to a period of intense agriculture, then back again to surviving on what they could eke out of nature’s diminished bounty.

“The farmers inadvertently crossed an ecological threshold and the changes became irreversible,” says Dr. David Beresford-Jones of the University of Cambridge.

Farming the Ica Valley was possible because of the huarango tree woodland, which literally held the floodplain together. The roots of the tree physically anchored the soils and protected the ground from erosion. The trees also maintained fertility by fixing nitrogen from the air and keeping moisture in the soil.

But as more land was cleared for crop production, so much of the woodland was cleared that the huarango’s benefits were lost. The land was then exposed to floods from El Niño events and strong winds parched the land when it wasn’t flooded.
Clearing the land of trees in order to grow crops had inadvertently and ironically made it impossible to grow crops.

Earlier residents of the valley had survived largely on land snails, along with sea urchins and mussels gathered from the Pacific coast, an eight-hour walk to the west. The researchers found no evidence of domesticated crops in the refuse heaps, called middens, left by these early inhabitants.

Things started to change around 100 B.C. Remains from crops, including pumpkins, maize, and manioc tubers, began appearing in the garbage heaps. Within a few hundred years there was more intensive agriculture. People added beans, peanuts, and chili peppers to their menus.

The feast didn’t last long though. After about 500 years of agriculture, the domesticated crops disappeared. People once again survived on only snails and seafood with some wild plants.

In less than two thousand years, the people went full circle and ended up eating what their ancestors had, but without the huarango forests. To this day, the land is barren, with only the ghostly outlines of irrigation canals to suggest that the land once supported an agrarian society.

Further evidence of the change is found in the disappearance of the use of a blue dye from the indigofera shrub. The shrub grows only in the shelter of huarango trees along waterways. The peoples of the Ica Valley frequently sported clothes dyed a rich blue between 100 and 400 A.D. But as agriculture increased, the use of the dye decreased, suggesting the indigofera’s habitat was also disappearing. Seeds from the shrub also became rare in the archeological record.

The indigofera eventually disappeared from the lower Ica Valley, but other plants became more common. Grasses that thrive in open areas became more common as the trees were cut down. Weeds that sprout in soil disturbed by agriculture also became more common.

The study of land use in the Ica Valley was recently published in the journal Vegetation History and Archaeobotany.

The peoples of the Ica Valley are not the only Peruvians to  suffer from the effects of deforestation. The hills around Lima, Peru were once
covered in huarango trees as well. The trees captured the fog from the ocean and  fed local aquifers. But after the Spanish conquest, the trees were cut and the  hills went dry.

 

Coast of Peru

 

 

Original article:

news.discovery.com

Photos:

IMAGE 1: The coastal desert of Peru. (Wikimedia Commons)

IMAGE 2: Photo STS109-730-80
from the STS-109 crew on March 9, 2002, showing layers of coastal Peruvian fog
and stratus being progressively scoured away by brisk south to southeast winds.
Remnants of the cloud deck banked against the larger, obstructing headlands like
Peninsula Paracas and Isla Sangayan, giving the prominent “white comma” effect.
Southerlies also produced ripples of internal gravity waves in the clouds
offshore where warm, dry air aloft interacts with a thinning layer of cool,
moist air near the sea surface on the outer edge of the remaining cloud bank.
South of Peninsula Baracas, the small headlands channeled the clouds into
streaks—local horizontal vortices caused by the headlands provided enough lift
to give points of origin of the clouds in some bays. Besides the shelter of the
peninsula, the Bahia de Pisco appears to be cloud-free due to a dry, offshore
flow down the valley of the Rio Ica. Caption provided by NASA Earth
Observatory; image provided by the Earth
Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory at Johnson Space Center.

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Why ancient Mayan communities were ‘living on the edge’ of what is now a massive wetland

Topic: Ancient Myan agraculture

Why ancient Mayan communities were ‘living on the edge’ of what is now a massive wetland.

Original article:

sciencedaily

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