Cocción experimental de tortillas de casabe (Manihot esculenta Crantz) y de camote (Ipomoea batatas [L.] Lam.) en planchas de barro: evaluando sus efectos en la morfometría de los almidones desde una perspectiva paleoetnobotánica

Abstract

Experimental cooking of cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) and sweet potato tortillas (Ipomoea batatas [L.] Lam.) on clay griddles: evaluating their effects on the morphometry of starches from a paleoethnobotanical perspective

Previous paleoethnobotanical studies on clay griddles—an

artifact traditionally related to the processing and cooking of cassava tortillas (Manihot esculenta Crantz) in the lowland Neotropics—has revealed a limited ubiquity of ancient manioc starch grains. In turn, other starchy plants such as sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas [L.] Lam.) and maize (Zea mays L.), among others, are consistently recovered and identified in many of the studied manioc-related artifacts. The main goal of this research report is first to replicate and then to qualitatively assess, from a starch grain morphometric analysis, one of the more extended ways of processing and cooking cassava and sweet potato as referred by some ethnohistoric and ethnographic data from lowland South America and the Antilles. It is known that thermal alteration/degradation of starches is one of the destructive mechanisms that could account for the low ubiquity or absence of manioc and other starch sources on archaeological clay griddles. Our results demonstrate that starch grains from both species survive the replicated processing and cooking techniques but at different preservation rates. This work firmly suggests that if ancient processes for preparing cassava or sweet potato tortillas were similar to the ones replicated here, then the cooking of tortillas on clay griddles had little or any direct relationship with the limited ubiquity of ancient manioc starch grains reported elsewhere. Keywords: Paleoethnobotany, starch, tortillas, clay griddles, Manihot esculenta, Ipomoea batatas.