Maize (Civ6)/Civilopedia

Maize – what North Americans call “corn” – is a grain first cultivated in Mesoamerica from the grass plant teosinte. Deliberate cultivation and selective breeding in the Central American milpas (slash-and-burned maize fields) or chinampas (floating maize fields) altered the small teosinte grains into the large cobs with which we are familiar today. As a staple crop, maize allowed for the expansion and dominance of the great New World cities of the Maya and Aztec empires and remains important for Central American cuisine. Soon after European contact, maize spread to much of the Old World as well, as maize used different kinds of soil and topography from rice, wheat or barley. The grain was taken up enthusiastically in Africa, where maize was first introduced by the Portuguese, and where maize transformed agricultural practices and land use on that continent: maize cultivation, with its faster growing season and intensive processing work, opened new roles for women’s labor in many African societies, thus further altering social divisions in the societies in which it entered.