This difference between agriculture in the Mediterranean area and the New World is quite as great as the difference between the pastoral activities of the Fertile Crescent and the scanty domestication of animals in the Americas. Here there is no solace for the diffusionist. As Lowie has said, “There is more resemblance between the Ionic capital and a Papuan headrest than between the sowing of cereals and the planting of a banana shoot.” (If he had been thinking specifically of our present problem, he would have substituted corn kernel or potato eye for banana shoot.) “Bee-keeping is not the same as training elephants or herding horses; and sowing seeds is not equivalent to planting a side-shoot or a tuber, let alone ridding a tuber [manioc] of its prussic acid.”[4]
When and Where Did Our Agriculture Begin?
There are two questions to be asked about agriculture in the New World: Where did it originate and with what plants? Did it have a multiple origin—which would entail a sort of independent invention? These questions have a bearing on how much time man spent in the inventing and perfecting of agriculture, and therefore on how long he had been thoroughly settled in the Americas when the Spaniards came.
Not so many years ago, Indian corn, or maize, was carelessly considered the first plant cultivated in the Americas—probably because it was the most spectacular—and was supposed to have originated in the highlands of Mexico or Guatemala. Now we know that pumpkins preceded corn, and so, in all probability, did most of the commoner food plants. Beans and melons, with their free-running vines and prominent flowers and seed pods, would seem most likely to have first attracted man—or, perhaps, woman—and led him to assist the processes of nature.
When corn was king, semiarid farm lands were supposed to be the place of its origin. Spinden saw “irrigation as an invention which accounts for the very origin of agriculture itself.”[5] Semiarid land, however, is notoriously hard to clear; though its plants are few, they have deep, tenacious roots. River flood plains of the Sonoran desert in Mexico—ideal by Spinden’s standard—yield no evidence of long or extensive occupation, according to Carl Sauer. Where irrigation was used in our Southwest, dates are not early. The evidence of the plants themselves, he writes, “overwhelmingly points not to desert or steppe but to several humid climates for their origin.”[6]