The Tehuacan Valley Project

The term Tehuacan means Place of Stones or Place of the Gods is the place where the arroyos and caves of prehistory man were discovered.  In 1949 Richard MacNeish Discovered the some tiny corncobs in a cave in the Sierra de Tamaulipas, in northeastern Mexico. These turned out to date to about 2500 B.C., approximately the same age as maize found in Bat Cave, in New Mexico. It was clear that corn had been domesticated at an earlier date, somewhere farther south. Based on the modern distribution of corn varieties, botanists had guessed that it was first domesticated somewhere between Mexico and Peru.

MacNeish set out to find dry cave sites in this region, hoping to excavate preserved specimens of early maize. He could not find dry caves in Honduras or Guatemala, but in the state of Chiapas in southeastern Mexico, he excavated a large cave called Santa Marta. Although he uncovered preceramic remains dating back to 7000 B.C., maize pollen was not present in any of the strata that predated 3500 B.C. This was not much earlier than the Tamaulipas corncobs, which implied that the first domestication had occurred some­where between Tamaulipas and Chiapas. The reported discovery of maize pollen, dating from about 4000 B.C., in a core taken near Mexico City, pointed to an origin south of that city, but north of Chiapas. The search narrowed when Paul Mangelsdorf, the botanist who had analyzed the Tamaulipas finds and who had attempted to re-create ancient maize by back-crossing modern varieties, told MacNeish that his research indicated that the wild ancestral maize had flourished in an arid highland valley. There were three such valleys between Mexico City and Chiapas: southern Oaxaca, the Tehuacan Valley in Puebla, and the valley of the Rio Balsas in Guerrero. MacNeish's survey of Oaxaca did not yield any promising rockshelters (some years later, however, early botanical remains were recovered from shallow but stratified caves that he had not investigated). MacNeish moved on to the Tehuacan Valley, where, after initially dis­couraging results, he discovered remains of early maize in Ajuereado Cave. MacNeish subsequently undertook a major archaeological project in the Tehuacan Valley, intensively excavating 9 sites and testing 18 others. The results allowed him to trace a cultural sequence from about 9500 B.C. to A.D. 1531, when the Spaniards arrived. Excellent preservation of plant and animal remains and even human feces in the dry caves of the valley enabled MacNeish to reconstruct, in remarkable detail, the subsistence strategies of the ancient Tehuacanos. To aid him in this effort, he enlisted the services of botanists, zoologists, and geologists, who studied the modern environment as well as the prehistoric remains.

Questionnaire:

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