Brazil’s precolonial villages grew maize without abandoning their diverse food system

Large circular settlements once spread across Brazil’s Cerrado, but their food systems did not fit a simple choice between farming and foraging. New chemical evidence shows that maize supported some of those communities without pushing other foods aside. The villages combined cultivation, wild resources and local ecological knowledge into different strategies.

Human remains preserved a record of diet

Archaeologists have long debated whether the Cerrado’s precolonial residents were mobile hunter-gatherers or settled maize farmers. Pots, plant remains and village layouts offered important clues, but direct evidence of what individuals routinely ate was scattered across a vast and environmentally varied region.

A study in Science Advances analyzed stable carbon, nitrogen and oxygen isotopes in teeth and bones from more than 100 people recovered at 37 sites. The locations span the Cerrado, Caatinga and Atlantic Forest biomes. Researchers paired those measurements with radiocarbon dates, animal isotope baselines, preserved plant evidence and environmental records to compare communities across time and place.

Each line of evidence answers a different question. Radiocarbon establishes when people lived, animal remains help define the local chemical background, and microscopic or charred plant traces identify foods directly present at a site. Isotopes then show what entered human diets repeatedly. Agreement among those records is stronger than any one pot, seed or skeleton considered alone.

Open-air villages carried a strong maize signal

Carbon isotope ratios can distinguish diets with a substantial contribution from maize from diets dominated by many other plants. Maize uses a photosynthetic pathway that leaves a recognizable chemical pattern in human tissues after repeated consumption. Bone reflects later years of life, while teeth can retain signals formed earlier.

People buried at large open-air villages showed a substantial maize contribution, indicating that cultivation played an important role in sustaining those settlements. Nearby rock-shelter communities living in broadly similar environments showed more diverse diets and little sign of intensive maize use. The contrast suggests a cultural and economic difference rather than a pattern forced entirely by local ecology.

Maize did not become a monoculture

The strongest finding is not simply that central Brazilian communities grew corn. Evidence from plants, animals and landscapes points to polyculture: maize existed within a broader system that included other domesticated crops, gathered plants, hunting and locally adapted management. Villages could rely heavily on maize without reducing food production to one field crop.

The Max Planck Society account of the research describes these as diversified maize-based systems capable of supporting large settlements. The result challenges two opposing stereotypes at once. Cerrado societies were neither untouched foragers living outside agriculture nor farmers locked into intensive single-crop production.

Polyculture can spread risk because foods respond differently to drought, pests and seasonal change. It can also use forest edges, savanna, gardens and managed wild stands as parts of one productive landscape. The archaeological evidence cannot reconstruct every planting decision, but it demonstrates that a strong maize signal and dietary diversity coexisted.

The Cerrado held several food traditions

The Cerrado is a tropical savanna covering a broad swath of central Brazil. Discussion of precolonial landscape engineering in South America has often centered on the Amazon, leaving the Cerrado’s large villages and earthworks less prominent in public accounts.

The new regional comparison shows that neighboring groups did not all adopt the same subsistence package. Some communities organized food production around maize-rich village economies, while others maintained diets built from a wider mix with little maize. Similar environments therefore supported distinct traditions, identities and settlement choices.

That variation warns against using one site to represent an entire biome. A circular village, rock shelter or cemetery captures a community within a larger network of exchange and movement. The study’s scale makes the differences visible because it compares many individuals and sites rather than turning an isolated chemical result into a continental rule.

It also leaves room for change within communities. A person’s childhood and adult tissues can carry different dietary signals, and villages occupied over long periods need not have followed a fixed recipe. Agriculture may have expanded, contracted or combined with seasonal mobility as social conditions shifted. The regional pattern is therefore a set of strategies, not a single stage on a universal path toward farming.

Ancient land use still shapes modern questions

The findings add human history to a landscape now recognized for exceptional biodiversity and intense agricultural pressure. Precolonial residents were not passive occupants of a pristine savanna. Cultivation, burning, gathering and settlement altered vegetation over generations, though those activities differed from modern industrial clearing and commodity monoculture.

Ancient polyculture does not provide a ready-made blueprint for contemporary farming. Climate, population, crops and political economies have changed radically. It does demonstrate that supporting large communities and maintaining a diverse food base were not mutually exclusive in the Cerrado.

The study replaces a binary argument with a more demanding picture. Maize mattered, sometimes substantially, but its presence did not erase other plants, animals or knowledge systems. Brazil’s central savanna held multiple ways of producing food, and the chemical record inside human remains shows that large villages could grow around agriculture without surrendering the diversity that made their food system resilient.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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