From Foragers to Feasts: the Evolution of Food Production and Cuisines in Tropical Mesoamerica
The goal of my project is untangling the complex history of early farming in tropical Mesoamerica and to link plants to the development of regional cuisines centered today around the triad of maize, beans, and squash, supplemented by hundreds of edible plants. Tropical Mesoamerica was long considered a backwater for farming with broadleaf rainforests and savannas unsuitable for sustaining agricultural populations. Today we know the incredible biological diversity of rainforests also reflects the diversity of edible plants, many rich in carbohydrates. Linking food traditions to archaeological reconstructions of plant-use across the Holocene will illustrate the development of a globally important food complex.
Professional Biography
Keith Prufer is an environmental archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico and the Center for Stable Isotopes. His current work focuses on the ecology of foraging to farming in the tropical Maya Lowlands. He studies the demographic and environmental contexts in which humans became increasingly reliant on food management strategies during the Middle Holocene and how, over thousands of years, they fundamentally altered their biosphere through sustained promotion of economically important plants and animals. By the beginning of the Late Holocene there were adept farming communities across the tropics, and as populations grew they increasingly engaged in surplus food production paving the way for larger social formations with emergent leadership strategies and increasing social inequality.