Guide Marisol Vásquez: Two Stops, Ten Thousand Years
1"Welcome to Guilá Naquitz. About 10,000 years ago, a small band of foragers, perhaps one or two families, camped in this rock shelter in the late summer and fall. Archaeologists who dug here found what they ate: acorns, piñon nuts, mesquite pods, wild beans, cactus fruit, and the bones of deer and rabbits. The cave is so dry that even seeds and bits of plants survived."
2"The diggers also found squash seeds larger than those of wild squash, from about 8000 BCE. They are among the oldest signs of farming in the Americas. Still, the people who left them kept moving from camp to camp with the seasons, and they got most of their food from wild plants and animals."
3"This cave also held some of the oldest known maize cobs, from about 4300 BCE. Maize, or corn, came from a wild grass called teosinte, which has only a handful of hard-shelled seeds on each small spike. Over thousands of years, farmers saved seeds from plants with bigger cobs and softer kernels. The cobs found here are tiny, far smaller than an ear of corn today."
4"Our next stop is San José Mogote, on the flat valley floor. By about 1500 BCE, families lived here all year in houses with walls of woven sticks covered in mud, set among fields of maize, beans and squash. Archaeologists found storage pits beside the houses and grinding stones for making maize dough. Some families made ornaments from shells brought from the ocean coasts, far beyond the mountains. The village later grew into the largest settlement in the valley."
5"Why did so many thousands of years pass between the first squash seeds and the first village? Many archaeologists think early crops gave too little food for people to live on them alone. Only when maize cobs grew larger, and beans and squash were grown along with maize, could a family's fields feed it through the whole year in one place."