Angela Huster
Stone tools for grinding corn – manos and metates – are a
fundamental hallmark of Mesoamerican culture. Prior to the introduction of modern
electric mills, Mexican women would spend several hours every day grinding corn
with a mano and metate. A mano and metate were traditional wedding gifts,
because they were so fundamental to setting up your own household. At
Calixtlahuaca, they are one more line of evidence for how the site is subtly different
from many contemporaneous Aztec sites.
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| A woman instructing her daughter how to grind corn in Codex Mendoza |
In Central Mexico, grinding stones go through two major
changes. First, early in Mesoamerican prehistory, there is a change from mostly
basin metates (with walls around the edges) and smaller handstones, to mostly
flat metates with longer handstones. Archaeologists generally assume that this
change is related to a shift toward grinding pre-soaked corn (a soft food that
doesn’t bounce around when it’s being ground), rather than small, hard seeds or
dry corn. In the US Southwest, the introduction of corn produces the opposite
pattern in metate forms, because people there grind their corn dry (Adams 1999).
There is a second change in grinding stone tools in the Postclassic, when
metates with legs and thin manos with handles on the ends become more common.
These changes would have made fine-grinding corn more efficient, perhaps as a
way to reduce the fuel needed for cooking or to make it easier to digest (Biskowski 2000).
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| Mano fragments from Calixtlahuaca |
At Calixtlahuaca, this second change didn’t really happen. We
get some metates with legs, but they aren’t the only type in use. More
noticeably, the shift from “Classic style” relatively thick manos without distinct
handle grips on the ends, to thinner “Aztec style” manos with handle grips is
missing. When I classified the ground stone from the site, I planned on using
the same coding categories from Mike’s previous projects in Morelos. This
classification basically has five categories for manos, ranging from one for a
thick mano without differentiated handles, to five for a thin mano with
pronounced handles. At sites in Morelos, most manos are 4s or 5s on this scale.
At Calixtlahuaca, there were only a couple of cases that even scored as 3s;
most were 1s or 2s.
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| Ways of classifying the shapes of manos |
This “conservatism” in grinding technology fits into two
larger patterns at Calixtlahuaca. First, it is likely related to differences in
how maize was eaten in the Toluca Valley, relative to many other parts of
Central Mexico (see previous posts on maize cooking HERE). If people at
Calixtlahuaca didn’t eat as many tortillas (which require finer-than-average
grinding), they may not have needed the increased efficiency provided by
handled manos. Second, the continued use of an older style of grinding stones
is part of a broader set of traits that people in the Toluca Valley maintained
long after their neighbors in the Basin of Mexico, including the use of red-on-natural
pottery, particular styles of censers, and lots of obsidian from the Ucareo
source.
Works Cited:
Adams, Jenny L.
1999 Refocusing the Role of Food-Grinding Tools as Correlates for
Subsistence Strategies in the U.S. Southwest. American Antiquity 64(3):475-498.
Biskowski, Martin
2000 Maize Preparation and the Aztec Subsistence Economy. Ancient Mesoamerica 11:293-306.
