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Authors: Neil MacGregor
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expected his disciples to work hard for their supper.
Even today, maize still dominates much of Mexican cuisine and carries a surprisingly powerful religious and metaphorical charge, as the restaurateur Santiago Calva knows only too well:
The continuous spin-offs of maize into daily life are vast and complex. There will always at some stage be maize around, and it jumps any class barrier or identity. Everybody eats it and drinks it, from the richest to the poorest, from the most indigenous to the least indigenous, and that’s one thing that unites us more than anything else.
Maize culture faces two new problems, one being the use of maize as a bio-fuel, which has caused an increase in prices. That directly affects the Mexican population. The other problem concerns genetically modified maize. It’s almost personally, and religiously, offensive that you are playing God. When you take corn to be used for purposes other than to be eaten or be worshipped, even to be put into a car, it becomes a highly controversial issue.
For some Mexicans it’s unthinkable that maize, the divine food, should end up in a fuel tank. And far beyond Mexico the idea of genetic modification of crops also causes deep unease, often as much religious as scientific. The habit of seeing something divine in the crops that sustain us, formed all over the world around 10,000 years ago, is still stubbornly alive. Whatever may be the benefits of modifying plants to improve yield or to resist disease, many still have an uneasy sense that the natural order is being disturbed, that humans are trespassing on territory that’s properly reserved for the gods.
10
Jomon Pot
Clay vessel, found in Japan
5000 BC
I know that it’s scientifically unrespectable, but it is sometimes nonetheless irresistible, to speculate how the great leaps forward in human object-making may have first occurred. So here is a very unscientific, very unrespectable guess about one of the biggest leaps of them all. Thousands of years ago, we can imagine that a lump of wet clay somehow ends up in a fire, dries out, hardens and forms a hollow shape; a shape that could hold things, in a tough, enduring material. By the time that the wet clay has hardened, a whole world of culinary possibilities, alcoholic delights and ceramic design has opened up. Mankind has made its first pot.
In the last few chapters, we have been looking at the way we now think humans began to domesticate animals and to cultivate plants. As a consequence, they started to eat new things and to live differently – in short, they settled down. It had long been assumed that pottery must have coincided with this shift to a more sedentary life. But we know now that, in fact, the earliest pottery was made around 16,500 years ago, in what most experts recognize as the Old Stone Age, when people were still moving about, hunting big-game animals. Nobody really expected to find pottery quite as early as that.
You’ll find pots all around the world, and in museums all around the world. In the Enlightenment gallery of the British Museum there are lots of them – Greek vases with heroes squabbling on them, Ming bowls from China, full-bellied African storage jars and Wedgwood tureens. They are an essential part of any museum collection, for human history is told and written perhaps more in pots than in anything else. As Robert Browning put it: ‘Time’s wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.’
The world’s first pots were made in Japan. This particular one, made there about 7,000 years ago in a tradition that even then was almost 10,000 years old, is initially quite dull to look at. It’s a simple round pot about the shape and size of a bucket that children might play with on the beach. It is made of brown-grey clay and is about 15 centimetres (6 inches) high. When you look more closely, you can see that it was built up with coils of clay and then fibres were pressed into the outside, so that
Even today, maize still dominates much of Mexican cuisine and carries a surprisingly powerful religious and metaphorical charge, as the restaurateur Santiago Calva knows only too well:
The continuous spin-offs of maize into daily life are vast and complex. There will always at some stage be maize around, and it jumps any class barrier or identity. Everybody eats it and drinks it, from the richest to the poorest, from the most indigenous to the least indigenous, and that’s one thing that unites us more than anything else.
Maize culture faces two new problems, one being the use of maize as a bio-fuel, which has caused an increase in prices. That directly affects the Mexican population. The other problem concerns genetically modified maize. It’s almost personally, and religiously, offensive that you are playing God. When you take corn to be used for purposes other than to be eaten or be worshipped, even to be put into a car, it becomes a highly controversial issue.
For some Mexicans it’s unthinkable that maize, the divine food, should end up in a fuel tank. And far beyond Mexico the idea of genetic modification of crops also causes deep unease, often as much religious as scientific. The habit of seeing something divine in the crops that sustain us, formed all over the world around 10,000 years ago, is still stubbornly alive. Whatever may be the benefits of modifying plants to improve yield or to resist disease, many still have an uneasy sense that the natural order is being disturbed, that humans are trespassing on territory that’s properly reserved for the gods.
10
Jomon Pot
Clay vessel, found in Japan
5000 BC
I know that it’s scientifically unrespectable, but it is sometimes nonetheless irresistible, to speculate how the great leaps forward in human object-making may have first occurred. So here is a very unscientific, very unrespectable guess about one of the biggest leaps of them all. Thousands of years ago, we can imagine that a lump of wet clay somehow ends up in a fire, dries out, hardens and forms a hollow shape; a shape that could hold things, in a tough, enduring material. By the time that the wet clay has hardened, a whole world of culinary possibilities, alcoholic delights and ceramic design has opened up. Mankind has made its first pot.
In the last few chapters, we have been looking at the way we now think humans began to domesticate animals and to cultivate plants. As a consequence, they started to eat new things and to live differently – in short, they settled down. It had long been assumed that pottery must have coincided with this shift to a more sedentary life. But we know now that, in fact, the earliest pottery was made around 16,500 years ago, in what most experts recognize as the Old Stone Age, when people were still moving about, hunting big-game animals. Nobody really expected to find pottery quite as early as that.
You’ll find pots all around the world, and in museums all around the world. In the Enlightenment gallery of the British Museum there are lots of them – Greek vases with heroes squabbling on them, Ming bowls from China, full-bellied African storage jars and Wedgwood tureens. They are an essential part of any museum collection, for human history is told and written perhaps more in pots than in anything else. As Robert Browning put it: ‘Time’s wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.’
The world’s first pots were made in Japan. This particular one, made there about 7,000 years ago in a tradition that even then was almost 10,000 years old, is initially quite dull to look at. It’s a simple round pot about the shape and size of a bucket that children might play with on the beach. It is made of brown-grey clay and is about 15 centimetres (6 inches) high. When you look more closely, you can see that it was built up with coils of clay and then fibres were pressed into the outside, so that
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