Maize for the Gods

Maize is the world's most productive food and industrial crop, grown in more than 160 countries and on every continent except Antarctica. If by some catastrophe maize were to disappear from our food supply chain, vast numbers of people would starve and global economies would rapidly collapse. How did we come to be so dependent on this one plant? Maize for the Gods brings together new research by archaeologists, archaeobotanists, plant geneticists, and a host of other specialists to explore the complex ways that this single plant and the peoples who domesticated it came to be inextricably entangled with one another over the past nine millennia. Tracing maize from its first appearance and domestication in ancient campsites and settlements in Mexico to its intercontinental journey through most of North and South America, this history also tells the story of the artistic creativity, technological prowess, and social, political, and economic resilience of America's first peoples.

"Blake lays out a fine and factual feast." -- Bob Grant The Scientist "My recommendation: make yourself a nice bowl of popcorn and settle down with Blake's book for a story as remarkable as the snack you are enjoying." -- Laurence A. Marschall Natural History Magazine "An engrossing scientific excursion." Terrae Incognitae "[Blake's] real triumph lies in his candid explanation and interrogation of modern research methods of maize: everything from archaeological dating and genetic investigation to microscopic analysis and ancient dietary reconstruction. In the end, what emerges is a complex narrative of reciprocal dependence. As Blake succinctly puts it, 'humans grow maize and maize grows humans'." Current World Archaeology

Michael Blake is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia who studies the origins of maize agriculture in the Americas and the emergence of sociopolitical complexity in Mesoamerica and the Northwest Coast of Canada. He is the author of Colonization, Warfare, and Exchange at the Postclassic Maya Site of Canajaste, Chiapas, Mexico and the editor of Pacific Latin America in Prehistory.