The Domestication of Maize: Process or Event?

DOMESTICATION of plants is an ancient process that has received continuous human attention and has only recently been accelerated by advances in genetics and chemistry. The common assumption that domesticated plants and animals constitute a set of varieties, separated at some time in the past from wild progenitors, needs to be reassessed. Throughout the history of agriculture, man has put genetic pressure on biota by means of some type of mass selection, so that scientific plant and animal breeding and modification are only the most recent extensions of domestication. Whatever the early agronomists lacked in knowledge of bagged stigmas and emasculated flowers, they made up for in continuity of activity through the millennia. Dr. Edgar Anderson has already suggested this idea in a comment on wheats, saying that their evolution under domestication is a process rather than an event, a process whose important early stages are still matters for experiment., We maintain that the operation of domestication can be studied, and that insights which might otherwise be lost can be gained, by putting problems in this perspective. The present paper reviews studies that mention the agriculture of North and Middle American Indians, with the objective of illustrating one form of a search for information leading toward an understanding of the effect of human behavior on the genetic composition of maize (Zea mays). Neither Heiser, Harris, nor Schwanitz-to name a few of the authors who have recently written on the origins of domesticationaddress themselves to the problems posed here.2 We have not included the spatial distribution of archeological evidence of changes of the maize plant.