Satellite image from Google Maps, showing outlines of abandoned rice fields in marsh area.

Peter A. Coclanis, in the online New Georgia Encyclopedia, writes:

Rice cultivation began in South Carolina in the late seventeenth century but did not become deeply entrenched until the second or third decade of the eighteenth century. Recent scholars have demonstrated that Africans and African Americans contributed much more than brute labor to the development of the rice industry that developed along coastal South Carolina and, later, coastal Georgia. More specifically, most scholars now believe that much of the technology involved in rice cultivation in this area originated in rice-producing regions in West Africa and was transferred across the Atlantic by slaves.

Coclanis, in his book The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920 (1989, Oxford University Press), argues that low-country plantations were less self-sufficient in foodstuffs than contemporaneous plantations. This meant they needed access to foodstuffs imported from other areas. Thus, Coclanis says, the antebellum low-country transportation system linked production areas with interior and coastal ports, which inhibited the development of nearby market towns and of a broad network of transportation routes (pages 146 and 147).

Rice (Oryza sativa), then, is an Old World crop, which became quite important in the economy of antebellum coastal Georgia. In the satellite image from Google Maps captured from along coastal Georgia and shown above, you can see the outlines of old rice fields. Seen from the edge of the marsh, the fields are less visible, unless you happen to be sighting down the field edge or along a drainage canal.

Nowdays, rice is not grown commercially along the Georgia coast, although the states of Arkansas, California, Louisiana, and Texas have substantial commercial rice agriculture. Rice farms in the modern USA use little hand labor, instead employing specialized equipment to adjust the elevation of the fields to improve conditions for flooding, prepare the seedbeds, and cut and thresh the rice.

So, why not is rice not now grown commercially here in Georgia? You might want to consider such factors as soil fertility, cost of labor (for example, the absence of the plantation economy and slavery), and productivity in pondering this…. Also, most of the rice grown in antebellum days was exported from North America, while much of the rice grown in the USA currently is used here. What effect might this have? Can you compare export costs between Georgia of, say, the early 1800s and today?

Figure 4 from the Speller et al. article in PNAS.

Among the world’s major regions, ancient North America is not known for having many domesticated animals. One exception, Camilla F. Speller and her colleagues note in a free article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America titled “Ancient Mitochondrial DNA Analysis Reveals Complexity of Indigenous North American Turkey Domestication,” is the wild turkey, or Meleagris gallopavo (with several subspecies defined based on plumage & geographic range, and confined—at least prehistorically—to several regions in North America and south to what is now southern Mexico)*. They write in their conclusion:

Domestication is a complex process, with human–animal interactions that vary considerably in terms of their intensity and their degree of human intervention…. The ancient DNA and archaeological evidence collected in this study reveals a wide range of past human–animal interactions within the Southwest United States, ranging from the hunting and/or capture of local wild turkeys, to the intensive husbandry and breeding of an imported domestic turkey lineage. Moreover, the DNA data indicate this Southwest domestic turkey lineage (H1) was maintained and propagated for well over a millennium, despite significant shifts in the geographic distribution and settlement patterns of Southwestern farming populations. This long history of turkey use undoubtedly reflects the economic and symbolic importance of domestic turkey for the Ancestral Puebloans, and other precontact Southwestern cultures.

This in-depth study presents conclusive evidence for the domestication of an indigenous North American animal. Moreover, as one of the few indigenous domesticates, the turkey represents an important case study through which to examine New World animal domestication in general. Previous DNA studies have exposed multiple domestications of Old World animals such as cattle, pig, sheep…, and this study supports a similar multicenter model for the New World. The DNA data point to at least two occurrences of turkey domestication in precontact America, one involving the South Mexican wild turkey, likely in south-central Mexico, and a second involving Rio Grande/Eastern wild turkey populations, with a subsequent introduction of domesticated stocks into the Southwest proper. In addition to significantly redirecting future research into North American domestication centers, this extensive study demonstrates the complexity and sophistication of ancient husbandry and breeding practices for one of the New World’s few domesticated animals.

Turkey bones have been identified from archaeological remains across the Southeast, including sites in Georgia. Isn’t it interesting to ponder how the Eastern wild turkey spread so far in prehistoric times, once domesticated? Evidence of penning is rare, but archaeologists keep their eye out for it. How would we identify if people were keeping turkeys penned near their residences?

This paragraph from the Speller et al. article is informative:

Our best evidence that “wild” birds were being kept at habitation sites comes from the H2 coprolites found at Turkey Pen Ruins in Utah, indicating that H2 birds were present and presumably confined at the site. These coprolites occurred in a thick dry midden dating almost entirely to the Basketmaker II period (ca. 200 BC–AD 450) with one H2 specimen appearing in the earliest dated stratum…. Thus, the capture and provisioning of local wild birds may have been synchronous with the introduction of the domestic birds into the region. A better understanding of the nature, timing, and extent of early wild turkey exploitation will require genetic analysis of securely dated bones and/or coprolites from additional Early Agricultural sites. Additionally, investigating whether wild H2 birds were being confined and provisioned in conjunction with domestic birds must be addressed through detailed analyses of archaeological contexts, isotopic data from bones, and palynological and macrofloral evidence from coprolites.

The terms H1 and H2 refer to haplogroups, or creatures sharing a common ancestor, identified through their genetic code (genotypes). These two haplogroups are identified by these researchers as indicating two different lineages (varieties) of domesticated turkeys.

Across much of the Southwest, turkey does not seem to have been in heavy rotation in the diet until the AD 1100s, although it appears in the archaeological record much earlier.

Do you know how archaeologists can tell if people were eating turkeys? And if those turkeys were wild or domesticated? And, perhaps more important, why does it matter which they were?

* A second turkey species, Meleagris ocellata, is native to the Yucatan Peninsula in southeastern modern Mexico.

When humans enter an ecosystem, they displace some species and prey upon others. This is true of both plants and animals, including species most of us don’t really notice (for example, nematodes in soil and rotifers in freshwater).

As human populations increase, and peoples intensify occupation of the environment (demographically, populations become denser), demands on environmental resources increase. The impacts of displacement and predation increase. They must; more people mean demands for food, shelter, and other material goods increase.

Photographs in this story are from the IUCN report.

In the Great Plains of North America, bison populations have decreased over the last two centuries—a response to increasing human populations and the consequences of that proliferation.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature is “a democratic membership union with more than 1,000 government and NGO member organizations, and almost 11,000 volunteer scientists in more than 160 countries” (according to the IUCN website). In early March 2010, the IUCN released a report called American Bison: Status Survey and Conservation Guidelines 2010. The report discusses the current status of the American bison (Bison bison).

The American bison ranged across the Great Plains in large herds, browsing on the vast prairie grasslands. Notes the report, “there is little doubt that prior to Euroamerican settlement, plains bison numbered in the millions, and probably even in the tens of millions” (page 8).

Through the late 1800s, bison herds were hunted commercially, to “open” lands for colonization by peoples from the east. There was also sport hunting. Environmental factors, including introduced bovine diseases, also reduced bison populations. Their numbers became so diminished that in 1905 the American Bison Society was formed and sought to establish bison herds at several federal landholdings (page 9).

Chapter 2 of the report, downloadable from this webpage, discusses bison prehistory and history, including the species’ original range. On page 11, the report notes:

With increased resolution and clarity afforded by ethnohistoric and ethnographic investigations, human-bison interactions among historic native peoples are better described and documented than for the late Pleistocene and Holocene. Bison continued to be the preferred game for many native North American cultures, especially on the Great Plains and Prairies, providing food, clothing, shelter, and tools…. Sustained by bison and plant resources, many native groups likely affected densities of other large herbivore species…. In addition to significant ecological relationships, the bison was a central element in oral tradition, rituals, dances, and ceremonies of native peoples of the Plains…, and it remains symbolically important in the cultural traditions of many native Tribes to this day.

The arrival of Europeans in North America, after 1492, resulted in significant changes in human-bison interactions, and changed the fabric of Native American life forever. Introduced diseases such as smallpox decimated indigenous human populations…, and altered subsistence, settlement, demography, and social organisation for many different groups. Bison hunting by native people was seasonal in nature. Bison were incorporated into a broad spectrum of plant and animal procurement activities…. Bison provided the economic basis for stable, resilient land use regimes and social systems. However, effects of Native American warfare and raiding during the historic period disrupted and destabilised these land use and social systems. The spread of horses into Great Plains aboriginal economies by the 1750s, and increasing commoditisation of bison products caused by the emergence of a European commercial market for wildlife products by the 1820s, contributed to the near extinction of the bison…. Native peoples traded bison hides for Euro-american commodities, with the market in bison robes reaching a peak in the 1840s. Hide hunters began to significantly participate in the market hunting of plains bison in the 1850s, and by the 1890s had decimated the herds. Even bones were cleaned for sale to the eastern fertilizer market, an activity that continued to 1906….

The bison is now extirpated from its original range across North America. Extirpation is a word ecologists use to refer to a species that no longer exists naturally in a particular area. In the case of the American bison, it no longer roams wild across an unlimited range, so it is considered extirpated—although it is not extinct. Extinct, in this context, means individuals of that species no longer exist.

Now, however, modern land use, including roads, communities, fields, and fenced pastures, mean that today’s bison cannot roam and graze as they did prior to this development. As the IUCN report notes:

Bison can best achieve their full potential as an evolving, ecologically interactive species in large populations occupying extensive native landscapes where human influence is minimal and a full suite of natural limiting factors is present. While such conditions remain available in the north of the continent, it is challenging to find extensive landscapes for restoring and sustaining large free-roaming wild bison populations in southern, agriculture-dominated regions. [page 2]

In the final summary, the report concludes:

The next 10-20 years present opportunities for conserving American bison as a wild species and restoring it as an important ecological presence in many North American ecosystems. Taking an ecosystem approach, which puts people and their natural resource use practices at the centre of decision-making, offers a paradigm for balancing the sometimes competing demands of bison conservation, the use of bison and biological diversity by people, and sustaining human communities in areas where there are many resource users combined with important natural values. To achieve ecological restoration at broad scales (large herds roaming across vast landscapes, at numerous locations) will require flexible approaches that can be adapted to a variety of legal and socio-economic conditions. Assembling large landscapes for conservation herds will typically involve several land tenure holders, potentially including public agencies, tribal governments, non-profit private organisations, and for-profit corporations or individual entrepreneurs. Diverse mandates, interests, and incentives will influence how stakeholders choose to manage land and wildlife, including bison. Creative new approaches are needed for forging enduring partnerships among land tenure holders for cooperative undertakings. Strategies may range from top-down government programmes to bottom-up market-based or cultural-based initiatives. Progress towards large-scale restoration will require a much more supportive framework of government policies and significant investment by both public and private sectors. Awareness and substantial public support are necessary at both the local level where restoration occurs, and among national constituencies for whom the bison is an iconic component of North America’s natural and cultural heritage. For ecological restoration of bison to be successful, careful assessment and understanding of biophysical, social, economic, legal, and political conditions are required for planning and implementation. This is particularly true where both community and agency support and involvement are required. This chapter provided guidelines for planning and implementing an ecological restoration project for bison, including feasibility assessment, selection of stock, preparation and release methods, assessing socio-economic and legal requirements, monitoring, evaluation, and adaptation. [page 112]

Although viable preservation of the species is the focus of the IUCN report, it also provides a good summary of the past of the American bison in North America, including a review of our understanding of human occupation of the Great Plains. Bison are known archaeologically from the Southeast, and bison trails are commonly believed to have been been incorporated into networks of human foot-trails (which later became the routes of roads and railroads).

Why do you think bison trails would have been used by humans?

Archaeologists often use indirect data to infer past cultural practices. This is because only certain data are preserved in archaeological contexts. Yet, we have questions that extend beyond that preserved data. Other types of data allow archaeologists to identify important information not directly available from the (somewhat limited) archaeological record.

For example, researchers at the University of Sheffield in England, have been interested in crop husbandry practices. This means they’re interested in what species were chosen to husband, or use, for food or other purposes. The information about the chosen species is often incomplete, so the researchers decided to look beyond direct data (e.g., seeds found stored in vessels in houses they excavated) to information they could get from associated weed species. Because the weed species were associated with the preferred species, they constitute indirect data.

These researchers found, not surprisingly, that the weed species at the archaeological sites they studied were most linked to ecological variation, especially productivity and disturbance. They note:

The range of attributes related to productivity indicate that both soil fertility and water availability play a part in this variation and that there is an interaction between productivity levels and the level of disturbance. Seasonality is a secondary factor relating primarily to water availability in arid environments and sowing time in more temperate regions.

Researchers say that as a result of this analysis they were able to infer that irrigation was used at an archaeological site where they had no direct evidence of it. At another site, they were able to identify sowing time and intensive cultivation, using the patterns of weed species, etc.

The paper is called “Crops and weeds: the role of weed functional ecology in the identification of crop husbandry methods,” and is by G. Jones, M. Charles, A. Bogaard, and J. Hodgson, all at the University of Sheffield, Department of Archaeology and Prehistory.

The paper was published on pages 70–77 in the Journal of Archaeological Science (2009). At present, the paper can be downloaded for free. Get to it by clicking here; it’s paper number 9.

Published in spring 2009, Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books) argues that the ability to use fire for cooking foodstuffs allowed the changes that have made humans a distinct species.

Says Wrangham, “cooking is the signature feature of the human diet, and indeed, of human life—but we have no idea why. It’s the development that underpins many other changes that have made humans so distinct from other species.”

Cooking changed digestion and, Wrangham argues, freed up physiological energy that made the larger brains we see in the fossil record possible. Cooking made many foods easier to chew, and increased the potential for food preservation. Also, using fire meant more warmth and protection during dark hours.

In the introduction, Wrangham writes,

Nowadays we need fire wherever we are. Survival manuals tell us that if we are lost in the wild, one of our first actions should be to make a fire. In addition to warmth and light fire gives us hot food, safe water, dry clothes, protection from dangerous animals, a signal to friends and even a sense of inner comfort. In modern society fire might be hidden from our view, tidied away in the basement boiler, trapped in the engine block of a car, or confined in the power-station that drives the electrical grid, but we are still completely dependent on it. A similar tie is found in every culture.

Wrangham says he’s the first to advance this argument, that the shift to cooking food made such a difference in human evolution. If this hypothesis is so plausible, why hasn’t it been put forth before? Also, what do you think of this argument?

Links

Harvard University press release by Steve Brandt.

Book review by Simon Ings on Telegraph.co.uk.

Book review on Powells books website, including link to author interview.

Book review by Dwight Garner on the New York Times website.

Basic Books webpage on this book.

Excerpt from the book’s introduction on the New York Times website.

View east down Williamsburg’s Duke of Gloucester Street, from Google Earth, a free downloadable program.

If you want to have coffee in an historic eighteenth century coffeehouse, you can now do so! The drinks that are offered are tea, chocolate, and, of course, coffee!

R. Charlton’s Coffeehouse was dedicated at Colonial Williamsburg on the afternoon of Friday, November 20th, 2009. The present building is rebuilt from the ground up. The original structure is only known from archaeological and archival data. Notes the Colonial Williamsburg website and press release:

Archaeological evidence recovered from the coffeehouse site reflects the importance of fine dining as well as the consumption of tea, coffee and chocolate. Charlton offered an epicurean menu that included fish, shellfish, all kinds of meat and game, even peacock. Besides hot beverages, patrons could choose from a section of wines, beer and spirits. A fragment of a Cherokee pipe suggests the presence of Indians who may have been part of an official delegation. Other finds include a number of wig curlers, indicating Richard Charlton’s connection to the wig-making business, and several bones from an anatomical skeleton that was likely used in scientific presentations.

R. Charlton’s Coffeehouse is built on its original foundations with 18th-century construction techniques and in compliance with modern building codes. The finished reconstruction will appear as close to the original structure as historical, archaeological and architectural evidence permits. It incorporates substantial portions of the building’s original brick foundations. The one-and-a-half-story framed portion of the building—35 feet square—is constructed of hand-sawn timber framing covered with cypress weatherboards and white cedar roof shingles. A central brick chimney allows two of the three first floor rooms to have functional fireplaces, while in the cellar a massive hearth is the central feature of the reconstructed kitchen. Research indicates that at least two of three first floor rooms were used for serving food and beverages which were prepared in the cellar. Other rooms on the first and second floors may have been rented or used for lodging or living quarters.

The general history page of the Colonial Williamsburg website notes:

Williamsburg was the thriving capital of Virginia when the dream of American freedom and independence was taking shape and the colony was a rich and powerful land stretching west to the Mississippi River and north to the Great Lakes. For 81 formative years, from 1699 to 1780, Williamsburg was the political, cultural, and educational center of what was then the largest, most populous, and most influential of the American colonies. It was here that the fundamental concepts of our republic—responsible leadership, a sense of public service, self-government, and individual liberty—were nurtured under the leadership of patriots such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and Peyton Randolph.

Tickets to Colonial Williamsburg start at $36 for adults, so your visit to R. Charlton’s Coffeehouse will not be inexpensive, but where else can you enjoy am eighteenth-century style coffeehouse!

Maps, a video of the coffeehouse, and an online tour can also be found at the Colonial Williamsburg website.

All photos used in this story are copyright 2009 by Colonial Williamsburg, and were obtained from their website.

Early European settlers were impressed by the productivity and sustainability of Native American agriculture in the Northeast. Today, as farmers begin to come to grips with the consequences of modern, mechanized agriculture, i.e., soil compaction, erosion, the run-off of fertilizers and top soil, and the cost of petro-chemicals to boost production, agronomists and some Native Americans are revisiting the techniques of 300 years ago to test their advantages.

This is how David J. Minderhout and Andrea T. Franz begin their article, “Native American Horticulture in the Northeast,” published in the Spring 2009 General Anthropology Bulletin of the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association, available here (currently free from Wiley InterScience).

They briefly summarize archaeologists’ current understanding of prehistoric agriculture and food preparation in Northeastern North America, with an eye to modern practices and our current food production situation. They note, for example, that, “Research also shows that intercropping, i.e., growing several crops in the same field, produces a diverse plant environment that is more resistant to drought and attacks by pests and plant diseases.”

One message that can be drawn from the information these authors present is that pre-modern innovations, methods, and techniques can provide us with important lessons relevant to the present.

The American Anthropological Association was founded in 1902 and “is the world’s largest organization of individuals interested in anthropology,” according to their website. Membership is approximately 10,000, with annual meetings attended by around 5000 individuals.

In Cultures of Habitat: On Nature, Culture, and Story (Counterpoint, 1997), ethnobotanist and essayist Gary Paul Nabhan argues that modern peoples tend not to have opportunities for discovery in the natural world, and that this distance from our environment means we don’t grasp the complexity of the world and of ecology. He writes on pages 97–98:

I have a wish for humanity: that all of our children would become field naturalists as they grow up. Imagine living in a society where every youth has the chance to explore the earth on foot and in hand, getting to know its creatures on a first-name basis.

…

The reason that I want everyone to become field naturalists has nothing to do with financial or professional rewards—or, for that matter, with the hope of advancing science. To the contrary, ecology seems to be the field in which I am most likely to fail to prove any scientific hypothesis I attempt to test. And that’s why I like it; I am constantly reminded how wrong I can be about how the world works.

That’s half the problem: most of us need to be humbled more often, to be reminded that nature is not only more complex than we think, it’s more complex than we can think.

The other half of the problem is that most children today grow up robbed of the chance of discovering anything at all on their own. They are told early on that scientists in little white coats discover all the world’s “facts” in neat, antiseptic laboratories. These facts are then handed to an ecologically illiterate public on an equally antiseptic platter filled with pasteurized, homogenized truisms to nibble on as stale appetizers empty of much of their former nutrition. Trouble is, all those tasty tidbits taste far more bland than any wild fruit plucked right off the tree.

And so I wish to champion the fine art of discovering, a process far different from the heroic act of discovery. Through the process of discovering, we seldom achieve any hard-and-fast truth about the world, its cornucopia of creatures, or its cultural interactions with them. Instead, we are inevitably assured of how little we know about that on which each of our lives depends.

Nabhan defines cultures of habitat as human communities that have long interacted with a particular landscape—and its non-human occupants—that is local to those communities. Usually we think of cultures as societies with particular customs and shared beliefs that are passed along from generation to generation. It stands to reason that cultures would have a grounding in their local habitats. Indeed, understanding this kind of human-environment linkage is fundamental to modern archaeological research and theory-building.

Do you think so many people find archaeology interesting because of the potential for discovery that Nabhan outlines? Is there a link between archaeological research and understanding and a knowledge of natural history as Nabhan describes? Or do you mostly disagree with Nabhan?

Elsewhere in this volume, Nabhan argues that people are not natural stewards of the environment. Do you agree?

Canada geese are native to North America and eastern Siberia and northeastern China. They are migratory birds, and their scientific name is Branta canadensis. We see migrating geese frequently today in the spring and autumn. They fly overhead in V-shaped formations, and you can often hear their honking if you’re outdoors.

Zooarchaeologists examine the bones, fish scales, and other remains of creatures recovered from archaeological contexts to determine which species were important to by-gone peoples.

Zooarchaeological studies so far seem to indicate that migratory waterfowl and migratory birds in general were not a major part of the Native American diet in Georgia and Southeastern North America.

Is this because they were difficult to catch or trap, or because their populations were much lower than today? Or perhaps their bones don’t preserve well, so our collections don’t show them. Or…?

These are modern high-bush blueberries. The fruit are still green; the photo was taken in Atlanta in early May.

You may be hearing more about BlackBerries (the smartphones) these days, but blueberries are worth a Ponder. Blueberries are in the news because they have lots of anthocyanins and other wonderful chemicals that are extremely beneficial nutrients in the human diet.

Blueberries (Vaccinium spp.) are native to North America. Blueberries were used by Native Americans to make pemmican. Pemmican is a dried meat-fat mixture that was a nutritious storable foodstuff. Sometimes the meat was pounded together with fruits, like blueberries, choke cherries, or currants, which made a mixture vaguely like a modern fruit leather.

Wild blueberry bushes in Georgia probably commonly grew in the forest subcanopy and understory. Blueberries have been identified by ethnobotanists in floral remains from archaeological sites across eastern North America.

Blueberries are an important modern commercial crop in Georgia, especially in the southeastern part of the state. In 2005, Georgia’s blueberry crop became more valuable than our peach crop. Our blueberry crop brought in $75 million in 2008. Read about the development of commercial blueberry horticulture in Georgia in the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

One problem Native Americans had to solve was how to store food. They had to deal with predatory insects, rodents, and other creatures that might get into their stores. They also had to process foods so that they would keep for a time. Dried food, like pemmican, was one way to do this.

How else might have prehistoric Native Americans stored food? Remember, they had no refrigerators or freezers.

The title of this Ponder playfully refers to a well-known book named “Blueberries for Sal” by Robert McCloskey. It’s about a girl named Sal who goes out with her Mom to pick blueberries and has a grand adventure.

This recipe adapted from 1993 Southwestern Indian Recipe Book: Apache, Papago, Pima, Pueblo, and Navajo by Zora Getmansky Hesse (The Filter Press, Palmer Lake, Colorado), and is from a modern Pueblo recipe.

Children should not attempt this without the help of an adult.

Once baking powder was available, Native peoples living in Georgia may have made similar corn cakes, although probably without the chilis, and the bacon.

Set oven to preheat at 350°F.

I bake this cornbread in an iron skillet. You can also use a greased 8×8 inch baking pan.

Take about three slices of bacon and chop them coarsely. Render slowly in an iron skillet, stirring frequently. When most of the fat is cooked out, remove the crispy meaty bits from the pan, leaving the fat. If you want to skip the bacon, just melt butter in the skillet in the oven. Tip and rotate the pan so the fat coats the pan on the bottom and the sides as high as the batter will flow.

Slide skillet into the oven to get hot.

Meanwhile, mix together in a large mixing bowl:

• 1 1/2 cups blue cornmeal
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 3 tablespoons sugar

In a separate smaller bowl, mix:

• 3/4 cup milk
• 1 egg
• 2-3 tablespoons bacon fat (or butter) from the skillet
• 1/2-1 small can of green chilis, chopped

Stir the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix well in just a few strokes. Pour the batter into the hot skillet (or greased baking pan). Return skillet to oven.

Bake for about 25-30 minutes, or until a wooden toothpick comes out clean. Let cool for a few minutes, then serve. Makes lovely pie-shaped pieces!

Optional: cook some chopped onion until soft with the bacon (or separately) and to the wet ingredients.

Optional: substitute yellow cornmeal. It won’t have the nutty flavor of the blue cornmeal, but still will be tasty.

Optional: lightly coat 1/2 cup raisins with wheat flour, and gently stir into batter.

Consider the chilis optional but extremely tasty, and preferred in Puebloan recipes!

Question: what kind of corn makes blue cornmeal?