Maize (Zea mays)

Assembled from 18 blocks · 2 evidence · 27 related

1. Story
2. Domesticated in Mesoamerica from the wild grass teosinte and the New World crop that spread furthest and fastest after 1492. Maize travelled east on the first return voyages and was being grown around the Mediterranean within decades; it reached West Africa through Portuguese contact and China by the middle of the sixteenth century, where local gazetteers record it well before any European traveller described it. Its appeal was the same everywhere: a high yield per hectare, a short season, tolerance of ground unsuited to rice or wheat, and cultivation on hill slopes that could be brought into production without displacing existing staples — which is why in China it is associated with the settlement of upland interiors rather than with the rice plains. Maize also carries a hidden cost that took four centuries to identify. Its niacin is chemically bound and unavailable unless the grain is treated with alkali, as Mesoamerican nixtamalisation does; populations that adopted the crop without the processing developed pellagra, an entirely avoidable deficiency disease that killed for generations in southern Europe and the American South.
3. Knowledge
4. The Columbian Exchange
5. Maize (Zea mays)
6. Connections
7. The Columbian Exchange
8. Maize appears in Chinese local records
9. Silver
10. The Atlantic crossing (Carrera de Indias)
11. Potato (Solanum tuberosum)
12. Maize (Zea mays)
13. The post-contact population collapse of the Americas
14. Maize appears in Chinese local records
15. A documented consignment of potatoes reaches Europe
16. Evidence
17. The gazetteer evidence dating the arrival of maize, sweet potato and peanut in China to the sixteenth century, and the argument that these crops enabled the settlement of upland interiors. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session. Volume and year are given from the author's knowledge; pagination is omitted. Subsequent scholarship has refined Ho's chronology and route arguments.
18. Establishes the biological framing of post-1492 contact — crops, livestock and pathogens moving between hemispheres — used throughout this pack. V55 verification basis: this session had no outbound network access (WebFetch blocked by egress policy, WebSearch budget exhausted), so the book was not consulted; the citation is given from the author's knowledge and the work is a standard, widely held title that a curator can verify in any research library catalogue.