BiblioVault - Books about Maize

Controversies in Science and Technology

From Maize to Menopause

Edited by Daniel Lee Kleinman, Abby J. Kinchy, and Jo Handelsman

University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

Written for general readers, teachers, journalists, and policymakers, this volume explores four controversial topics in science and technology, with commentaries from experts in such fields as sociology, religion, law, ethics, and politics:

* Antibiotics and Resistance: the science, the policy debates, and perspectives from a microbiologist, a veterinarian, and an M.D.

* Genetically Modified Maize and Gene Flow: the science of genetic modification, protecting genetic diversity, agricultural biotech vesus the environment, corporate patents versus farmers' rights

* Hormone Replacement Theory and Menopause: overview of the Women's Health Initiative, history of hormone replacement therapy, the medicalization of menopause, hormone replacement therapy and clinical trials

* Smallpox: historical and medical overview of smallpox, government policies for public health, the Emergency Health Powers Act, public resistance vs. cooperation.

[more]

Maize and Grace

Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500–2000

James C. McCann

Harvard University Press, 2007

Sometime around 1500 AD, an African farmer planted a maize seed imported from the New World. That act set in motion the remarkable saga of one of the world’s most influential crops—one that would transform the future of Africa and of the Atlantic world. Africa’s experience with maize is distinctive but also instructive from a global perspective: experts predict that by 2020 maize will become the world’s most cultivated crop.

James C. McCann moves easily from the village level to the continental scale, from the medieval to the modern, as he explains the science of maize production and explores how the crop has imprinted itself on Africa’s agrarian and urban landscapes. Today, maize accounts for more than half the calories people consume in many African countries. During the twentieth century, a tidal wave of maize engulfed the continent, and supplanted Africa’s own historical grain crops—sorghum, millet, and rice. In the metamorphosis of maize from an exotic visitor into a quintessentially African crop, in its transformation from vegetable to grain, and from curiosity to staple, lies a revealing story of cultural adaptation. As it unfolds, we see how this sixteenth-century stranger has become indispensable to Africa’s fields, storehouses, and diets, and has embedded itself in Africa’s political, economic, and social relations.

The recent spread of maize has been alarmingly fast, with implications largely overlooked by the media and policymakers. McCann’s compelling history offers insight into the profound influence of a single crop on African culture, health, technological innovation, and the future of the world’s food supply.

[more]

Of Marshes and Maize

Preceramic Agricultural Settlement in the Cienega Valley, Southeastern Arizona

Bruce B. Huckell

University of Arizona Press, 1995

While it was once believed that agriculture and pottery developed concurrently in prehistoric societies, modern research has concluded that agriculture preceded pottery making, since a sedentary life with greater food production led to both the need and time to create storage containers. Bruce Huckell has been at the forefront of a movement in Arizona archaeology that has greatly modified our understanding of the transition from the Archaic to the agricultural periods in the Southwest. Work done by Huckell and others at Matty Canyon has produced the most detailed account available of a Late Archaic village and has been extremely influential in suggesting that the cultivation of maize predated the appearance of pottery. Of Marshes and Maize presents archaeological information obtained from small-scale investigations at two deeply buried preceramic sites in the Cienega Creek Basin. Its report on excavations at the Donaldson Site and at Los Ojitos offers a thorough description of archaeological features and artifacts, floral and faunal remains, and their geological and chronological contexts. From this data, the author concludes that a major shift toward a sedentary lifeway dependent on maize agriculture had already occurred by Late Archaic times (c. 500 to 800 B.C.), demonstrating that previous research on late preceramic sites in this region has provided an inadequate picture of the period. This monograph represents the first full presentation in the literature of an important set of data that is well-known among researchers but has thus far not been easily accessible. It is a classic example of the use of fragmentary evidence in well-dated contexts to introduce new ideas, and will stand not only as an important record of the evidence but also as the primary reference for this significant new interpretation of the late Archaic and the introduction of agriculture into the Southwest.

[more]