Farming, Food, and Settling Down

At least 7000 years ago, Indigenous inhabitants of Panama began to introduce cultivation of three important crops, alongside their continued hunting and gathering: corn (Zea mays), manioc (Manihot esculenta), and arrowroot (Maranta arundinacea). I probably don’t need to tell you about the advantages of growing corn, since we continue to get a lot of our starch from this plant today in the United States. You may know manioc as cassava or yuca, which is very tasty boiled, fried, or fermented into the alcoholic beverage chicha. The boba pearls in bubble tea are also made from this plant! While you may not have heard of arrowroot, it is a starchy root plant like manioc, most commonly ground into flour. At one site that I documented in Darién, called Santiago Barbúa, we found metates (grinding platforms) and manos (pestles) that were used to produce this flour. This work was typically done by women, and analysis of human bones from a neighboring area has shown that because of all the grinding they did, women typically had larger, stronger arm muscles than men! This shows we should be careful about making assumptions about gender roles and anatomical differences between men and women when we study the past.

Corn was first domesticated from a wild plant called teosinte about 9000 years ago in southwestern Mexico and quickly became popular throughout Central and South America. Manioc and arrowroot, by contrast, were first domesticated in northern South America, possibly in what is now Brazil or Ecuador. Panama is the only pre-Hispanic context in Central America where all these domesticates appear, which shows that it was an important location for interactions between Indigenous communities to the north and south. This feature makes its archaeology particularly unique (and sometimes confusing!) and continues to influence contemporary Panamanian food, music, language, and politics.