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EVANS common at Early Formative campsites in Mesoamerica, and to this day maguey heart is known as a reliable buffer against starvation. It provides few calories for the effort of mastication, however, and this use would preclude the many other ways of exploiting the plant; for these reasons we assume that the quids were chewed only in times of extreme hardship. When any other food was available, the plant would serve its multiple purposes, and the heart of maguey might be processed into luxuriously silky thread; when the famine years came, the heart of maguey kept the edge off raw hunger and provided a few calories, some phosphorous, iron, and Band C vitamins. Fibers. Fibers from the heart of the maguey, but even more importantly from maguey pencas (leaves), were vital to the village economy. At Cihuatecpan evidence of fiber production is found in every house: basalt maguey scrapers (to strip down the fibers from the pencas) and ceramic spindle whorls document two phases of the complex fiber and cloth production process. In addition to producing thread and standard woven mantles, the households probably also made rope, nets, and baskets as these were needed by the family or were marketable. Woven textiles constituted a sort of currency in the three exchange systems (tribute, long-distance trade, and marketplace), and weaving skills were highly valued in women because they were the householdlevel producers of massive numbers of textiles. To fulfill its share of the Codex Mendoza tribute alone, each Cihuatecpan household had to produce four long woven mantles a year. Other Uses. Other uses of the plant include medicines derived from the sap and the probable use of pencas for construction material and for animal fodder (if the pencas were immature). The dead plant was burned for fuel, and its ashes would have been used as fertilizer. The maguey plant was clearly a mainstay of the village economy, and in essential value it outweighed nopal, the other common xerophytic "orchard" plant in the Teotihuacan Valley. The foods nopal produces (cactus paddles as a green vegetable and tuna, the pink, heartshaped fruit) are important for rounding out the diet (Woot-Tsuen and Flores 1961:33, 37, 59, 62) but do not sustain life. Nor is nopal suited to a wide range of nondietary uses, as is maguey. Nopal did, however, produce a very valuable crop, the cochineal insect. The processing of the insect into dye can be easily managed 112 MAGUEY TERRACE AGRICULTURE with implements found around the Aztec house, and so valuable was the dye that even the rinse waters of the implements were used to impart color to fibers. Because specialized tools apparently were not used, and residues of the dye were removed in the dye process, archaeological evidence for this industry is lacking (or indistinguishable from evidence of more ordinary pursuits). But early colonial documents refer to the strength of the industry in this general area and to its importance (second only to gold) in the colonial export economy (Gibson 1964:354). Cochineal was also highly valued in Aztec times and would have been a natural sideline of textile production at Cihuatecpan. CONCLUSION The cultivation of maguey and other xerophytic plants in the central highlands of Mexico transformed the sloping piedmont zone into a productive landscape several centuries before the Spanish conquest. Maguey gave peasant farmers a stable source of raw materials for craft production and provided basic caloric and liquid requirements. The versatility of maguey's uses permitted the settlement and exploitation of a broad area, contributing substantially to the demographic and economic strength of the Aztec period. These conclusions are drawn from information compiled from archaeological , ethnohistoric, and ethnographic sources. The Aztec period village of Cihuatecpan is the case study, the basis for reconstruction of the agricultural resource base. Ethnohistoric documentation of maguey production and ethnographic studies on maguey, as well as documentation of settlement and agricultural patterns, permit us to estimate the agricultural strategies in use at Cihuatecpan and maguey's importance there and in countless other peasant villages. The interplay of maguey farming and settlement of the piedmont lands resulted in Aztec period population levels in the Teotihuacan Valley that were nearly as high as those of the Classic period a thousand years before. What exploitation of the springs at Teotihuacan had done to expand the productivity of the valley's alluvial plain during the Classic period, exploitation of maguey did for the slopes a millennium later. 113 [3.15.5.183] Project MUSE (2024...

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