Dr. Francesco Berna and Stephanie Simms Discovery News Article
Mayans Cooked Food With Clay Balls
Rounded clay balls found in Mexico reveal an ancient Mayan cooking technique.
By Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News
Thu Nov 29, 2012
Planning a last supper party on December 21? To celebrate the Mayan way, you might need several clay balls. That’s one way the Maya cooked their food, according to U.S. archaeologists who have unearthed dozens of rounded clay pieces from a site in Mexico. Conducted with the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) and Millsaps College’s financial support, the excavation of a kitchen at Escalera al Cielo in Yucatán revealed 77 complete balls and 912 smaller fragments. About 1-2 inches in diameter and more than 1,000 years old, the clay balls contained microscopic pieces of maize, beans, squash and other root crops.
The finding supports the hypothesis that the balls “were involved in kitchen activities related to food processing,” archaeologists Stephanie Simms, Francesco Berna, of Boston University, MA, and George Bey of Millsaps College, MS, wrote in the Journal of Archaeological Science.