Andean Foodways / The Latin American Studies Book Series (PDF)

John E. Staller (Ph.D. SMU, 1994) is Research Associate with The Botanical Research Institute of Texas and independent researcher. He is an anthropological archaeologist specialized in Latin America and his fieldwork mostly focuses on the Andes and, to a lesser extent, Mesoamerica. He has considerable expertise in the Spanish colonial accounts and ethnohistory. Next to his research on the origins of agriculture, plant domestication and cultivation in Latin America, he has taught as professor at several universities.
As a research associate with The Field Museum in Chicago (IL, USA) for ten years, he researched and published on several of the museum's various collections. John E. Staller has identified the only known endemic variety of maize in the world specifically and exclusively adapted to the Copacabana Peninsula in the Lake Titicaca Basin, Bolivia. He authored and edited numerous publications on maize (Zea mays L.) and the biogeography of cultivated plantsin Latin America. This includes the volume "Pre-Columbian Landscapes of Creation and Origin" (978-0-387-76909-7) which he edited in 2008, the authored volume "Maize Cobs and Cultures: History of Zea mays L." in 2010 and the volume "Pre-Columbian Foodways" which he edited with Michael Carrasco in 2010 (all published by Springer).