Sheum in Ancient Times, Part IV

It is recorded that when the Spanish arrived in the New World, they found no Old World grains, fruits or vegetables being grown by the natives, nor wild upon the land. The New World corn (maize), yams, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, potatoes, corn, peppers, beans (all but the broad or fava bean), peanuts, chocolate, and vanilla, were new to the Spanish. In Peru, the Spanish found the Inca had quinoa and kiwichi, two supergrains of great value to the indigenous natives. But they reported finding no wheat, barley, or other Old World grains. In addition, the Spanish discovered avocados, blueberry, passion fruit, pawpaw, pineapple, Butter Beans, Kidney Beans, pumpkin, Runner Beans, chili, artichoke, squash, guava, cacao, cashew, etc.

However, the question is and always has been, “What happened to these Old World grains the Jaredites and Nephites brought to the New World?”

To understand this, the history of the grain quinoa in ancient Peru might give us a clue. This “supergrain” known today as perhaps the most valuable of all grains, has been grown in the Andean area since 3000 B.C. It was certainly grown during the time of the Nephites who occupied that area for a thousand years, known to them as “sheum.” But sometime shortly after the demise of the Nephites (400 A.D.), the quinoa grain began a long and slow decline, until about 1000 A.D., the grain was completely unknown and unidentified, laying dormant over the next more than 400 years. At some point in the rise of the Inca, the quinoa plant was rediscovered and by the time of the arrival of the Spanish, had become the second most important of three staple foods in the Inca diet: potato, quinoa, and corn.

Each year the ruling monarch, “The Inca,” ceremoniously planted the first quinoa with gardening equipment made of gold, and was so valuable to them they called it “The Mother of all Grains.”

Quinoa has a bitter seed coating called saponin that protects it from being eaten by birds while out in the field. In modern commercial processing this is rinsed off before sale, but the Spaniards arriving to the New World did not know of this, and so ended up not liking the taste of quinoa. As a result, potatoes and corn made it back to Spain from the newly discovered Incan lands, but quinoa was shunned and denigrated it as “food for Indians,” actively suppressed its growth due to its sacred status in non-Christian religious rituals. Later, the Conquistadores became horrified with the violent and bloody Incan religious sacrificial practices, and anything Incan became taboo.

Today outside of South America, quinoa is called “the supergrain of the future.”

But over the past centuries, quinoa, once the most popular grain in all South America, fell into obscurity for centuries and nearly extinction, became popular once again, only to be denigrated by the Spanish until it was totally unknown once again until the early 20th century. Had the grain not been so hardy and tolerant to almost any inactivity, the quinoa would have gone the way of the untended wheat and barley planted by the Nephites. Today, we know of it only because of the remarkable restorative capability of modern farming techniques—though it had always been there, it was unknown and unidentified until modern man found mention of it in old Spanish chronicles of the 16th century and began to look for it in the Andean area.

What, then of barley and wheat? The latter is not a hardy grain, requiring the best of treatment, soils and irrigation. Unattended, the grain will die out and not return. Barley is far more hardy, capable of growing in the worst of soils and is drought resistant. And, though not discussed much, the barley plant has been found in areas of the American southwest, dating back to about 300 B.C.

The problem always lies in the fact that though seeds are found in the Americas dating to before Columbus, no scientist or botanist, archaeologist or anthropologist, believes Old World grains ever existed in the Americas prior to the Spanish, consequently, the discoveries of such seeds remain “unidentified.” (As stated above, not until the quinoa seed's existence was found in old Spanish chronicles of the Andes, was an effort mounted to find the quinoa seed.) Shortly after these discoveries in Arizona, barley seeds were found in Oklahoma and Illinois. According to a 1983 article in “Science 83”: “Of the discoveries made in Illinois, one recent study states that a "previously unidentified seed type . . . has now been identified as little barley (Hordeum pusillum), and there are strong indications that this grain must be added to the list of starchy-seeded plants that were cultivated in the region 2000 years ago."

It is hard for science to identify something as existing when all their training, knowledge and understanding claims that such does not exist.