Maya maize god statue

After the Ice Age: Food and Sex (9000 - 3500 BC)

Maya maize god (made around 1,300 years ago). Stone statue, found in Honduras

But he comes at the end of a very long tradition; Central Americans had been worshipping him and his predecessors for thousands of years, and his mythic story mirrors the annual planting and harvesting of the corn on which all Central American civilisation depended. Like the maize plant, the maize god is decapitated at harvest time, and is then reborn - fresh, young, and beautiful at the beginning of each new growing season. John Staller, anthropologist and author of the book 'Histories of Maize' explains why the maize god was a common choice for rich and powerful patrons:

'The elite from ancient societies focussed upon corn as having sacred kinds of properties which they then associated with themselves. And this is pretty obvious in the young maize god - the sculpture was apparently a manifestation of mythological beings resulting from the third Maya creation.

There were eight mythological beings, four women and four men, who are the ancestors of all the Maya people. The Maya believed that their ancestors essentially came from corn, and they were formed of yellow and white maize dough. Maize was certainly a primary focus of ritual and religious veneration by ancient Meso-American people, going back all the way before the Maya and even into the Olmec civilisation.'

So our maize god is not just a hauntingly beautiful statue, he gives us a real insight into the way ancient American society thought about itself and its environment. The maize god represents both the fact of the agricultural cycle of planting, harvesting and replanting, and the faith in a parallel human cycle of birth, death and rebirth - but more, he is the very stuff of which the Central Americans are made. Where the Hebrew god made Adam out of dust, the Mayan gods used maize to make their humans. The mythical story is told in the most famous epic in the whole of the Americas, the 'Popol Vuh'.

For generations, this was passed on through oral traditions before finally being written down in the seventeenth century. Here's a taste of it:

'And here is the beginning of the conception of humans and of the search for the ingredients of the human body ... So they spoke; the bearer, begetter, the makers, modellers - and a sovereign plumed serpent - they sought and discovered what was needed for human flesh. It was only a short while before the sun, moon and stars were to appear above the makers and modellers. Split place, bitter water place, is the name, the yellow corn, white corn, came from there. And this was when they found the staple foods, and then the yellow corn and white corn were ground. After that they put into words the making, the modelling of our first mother-father, with yellow corn, white corn alone for the flesh, food alone for the human legs and arms for our first fathers, the four human works.'

But why did maize become the favoured food and the revered grain of the Americas? Why not wheat or a certain type of meat? The answer lies not in maize's divine connections, but in the environment that Central America offered. In this part of the world at this time around nine thousand years ago, other food resources were very thin on the ground. There were no easily domesticated animals - as you would find pigs, sheep or cattle elsewhere - and the staples were a trinity of plants that were slowly cultivated and tamed: squashes, beans and maize. But beans and squashes don't become gods - why does maize?

Well, the plant from which maize derives, the teosinte, is wonderfully adaptable. It's able to grow in both the lush wet lowlands and the dry mountainous regions, which means that farmers can plant crops in any of their seasonal dwellings. On top of that, constant harvesting of the grain encourages the plants to grow larger and more abundantly, so maize quickly became plentiful - farmers got a healthy return for investing their labour. But crucially, maize is a rich carbohydrate that gives you a rapid energy hit. But it is, let's face it, pretty stodgy, and so from very early on, farmers also cultivated an ingenious - and tasty - accompaniment; the indigenous chilli. It has virtually no nutritional value but, as we all know, it's uniquely able to liven up dull carbohydrates - and it shows that we've been foodies for as long as we've been farmers.

By AD 1000, maize had spread north and south, virtually through the whole length of the Americas; which is perhaps surprising - because, in its earliest form, not only did maize have little taste, it was practically inedible. It couldn't just be boiled and eaten straight away as it is today. Nine thousand years ago, the maize cob was very hard, and eating it raw would have made you very ill. It needed to be cooked in a mixture of water and white lime. This elaborate process of boiling the raw kernel in lime and water was essential. Without it, the two key nutrients in the vegetable - the amino acids and vitamin B - would not be released. After all that, it had to be ground into a paste and then made into an unleavened dough. The god of maize expected his disciples to work hard for their supper. Even today, maize still dominates much of Mexican cuisine, and it still carries a surprisingly powerful religious and metaphorical charge, as restaurateur Santiago Calva knows only too well:

'The continuous spin-offs of maize into daily life is vast and complex. At some stage there will always 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 more than anything else.

'Maize culture faces two new problems, one being the use of maize as a bio-fuel and the increment of prices, where it directly affects the Mexican population. The other problem being the genetically-modified maize, it's almost personally offensive - and religiously - that you are playing God, as it were ... it's just very sensitive. Especially when you take corn to be used for other purposes other than to be eaten or be worshipped, but rather to be put into a car - it becomes a highly controversial issue.'

So even today for some people it's unthinkable that maize, the divine food, should end up in a petrol tank. Well beyond Mexico, the idea of genetic modification of crops still causes deep unease, as much religious as scientific - a sense that the natural order is being disturbed, that humans are trespassing on territory that's properly reserved for the gods. In a very real sense, the Mexican maize god is still alive, and he's not to be trifled with.

In our next programme, we'll be turning from the food of the gods to the vessels that it's cooked in. We'll be in Japan, with some of the oldest pottery in the world, and the birth of the stew.