Plant domestication seems directly linked to the advent of pastoralism, while experimentation with seeds and the cultivation of grains is seen as a result of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon hybridization.² It was during the later Archaic period that humanity began to seriously manipulate wild plants for nutrition, and for spiritual use. The ways in which humans used plants for foods and in ritual caused the values of individuals, and, ultimately, whole societies to shift.³ Many edible plants important in the Archaic period were derived from plants of Central and South American origin, and are ancestral to the crop plants of our current industrialized corporate agricultural system.

 

The change from a hunter and gatherer existence to a more sedentary lifestyle was a gradual process that had a direct relation to the use of plants as foods for man,⁴ and also animals. It is now understood that what was once termed the wild jungles and virgin rain forests of the Amazon were, in fact, a complex network of wild nurseries maintained by the indigenous hunters and gatherers.⁵ M. Kat Anderson⁶ also suggests that the interrelationship Native North Americans had with their landscapes greatly influenced the evolution of plant and animal communities over millennia. “What early European explorers mistook as pristine untouched wilderness was in fact a vast intimately managed “garden”.”⁷

 

Agriculture initiated the need for pottery since many plants needed to be stored, processed, and cooked. Solomon Katz suggests that the original impetus for the domestication of grain was not to make bread, but to make beer. This applies to the very beginning of the domestication of the wild ancestors of New World corn or Old World barley five thousand years ago.⁸ Prehistorically, intoxication was viewed as a genuinely religious experience where brewing was done entirely by the Chosen Women,⁹ under the divine protection of two goddesses.¹⁰ Historically, alcohol is the dominator drug par excellence which reflects the disequilibrium and tension existing between men and women, and the individual and society. Corn and grains became gods; they became symbols of domestication and domination.¹¹ Prehistorically the production of alcohol implies that surplus grains were available, that famine did not occur, or that alcohol was considered a ritual requirement. Various parts of the maize plant were used to make the traditional tesgüino, aqa, or nawá that were the corn beers of the various Pan-American tribes.