A Preliminary Survey of Maize in the Southwestern United States

Maize is uniquely variable; differences from plant to plant, from variety to variety, and from region to region are even greater than in other cultivated plants.Previous papers by Anderson and his collaborators (Anderson and Blanchard, '42; Anderson and Cutler, '42; Kelly and Anderson, '43; Anderson, '43a, b, '44a, b) have discussed the means of cataloguing this variation most effectively.They have recorded it in detail, character by character, and have described a few of the races and sub-races which are already apparent in our collections.The following paper is an attempt to classify the maize of the southwestern United States, particularly the varieties grown by the Indians.While it is more comprehensive than any previous attempt, we consider this a preliminary report since it raises many more questions than it answers, and of these, many should yield to further investigation.Maize is also unique for purely technical reasons in its excellence for both cytogenetic and archaeological investigation.For cytogenetics it has the initial advantages of many readily available unit characters such as starchy vs. sweet kernels; green leaves vs. purple leaves.For cytological analysis it has the advantage of long, well-differentiated chromosomes.To these original advantages has been added by cooperative research a wealth of detailed technical information unparalleled for any other plant (see Rhoades and McClintock, '35).Archaeologically, maize has the advantage of its large indurated ear which resists decay and which presents almost as many significant characters for racial diagnosis as does the human skull.Therefore, when cytogenetic and archaeological informations are merged we may expect eventually a more complete, detailed, and significant history than is possible for any other cultivated plant or any domesticated animal.Such a synthesis would be useful to geneticists, archaeologists, corn breeders, geographers, ethnologists, and culture historians.l'This paper results from the active collaboration of a er of individuals and institutions.'The actual funds w ere suppli ed by Universi sity of California, сч heim Foundati го Unive of Virginia, Cold Spring Harbo к ornia аа of Technology.a m as to the хен wing individuals: Hugh С.