Píib (ancient Maya earth-oven cooking) Period COrigin theory BVerified

Pib refers to the earth-oven cooking of the Yucatan peninsula, in which heated stones and food are buried in a pit dug into the ground, covered with earth, and steamed and roasted. The Maya word pib means "to bury," and from it came the word-form pibil, "the thing that is roasted." What was served was native game and fowl, such as pheasant, deer, and wild pig, coloured with the red pigment of achiote (annatto). These were foods long rooted in this land, where the forests and gardens of the peninsula ran straight to the table.

At the heart of the dish is the technique itself: the slow steam-roasting in a pit oven. Heat sealed in under a covering of earth cooks the meat with the residual warmth of the stones, wrapping it in the scent of smoke and soil. The earth oven is a method native to the land, not found in Spanish cooking traditions, and it is distributed across the whole peninsula and out into a wide range of Mesoamerica. The setting in which the dish was served was of the land as well. Earth-oven food was placed at Maya festivals and offerings, foremost among them the Hanal Pixan, the food for the dead, and in time it spread to the household table.

On the foundation of this earth-oven pib, later joined by the pork the Spanish brought, arose the cochinita pibil well known today. It is a derivative in which a foreign ingredient was laid over a native technique, and its emergence falls much later, in the colonial period.

Around pib there is a telling that, under the name of an "ancient Maya dish," carries today's cochinita pibil, made with pork, straight back into pre-Hispanic times. But the pork of that meat was a foreign livestock the Spanish brought to the Yucatan in the sixteenth century. What lay in the pre-Hispanic earth oven was native game and fowl, and to speak of the pork-based present form as the same thing as the old layer is an error that folds several hundred years into one.

The antiquity of the earth-oven pib tradition itself, on the other hand, has been confirmed as a separate matter. The Maya-Spanish vocabulary, the Diccionario de Motul (a manuscript of 1577), records pib both as a noun and a verb: an oven for roasting squash, meat and the like in the ground, and the act of roasting in it. At the latest by the close of the sixteenth century, then, this technique existed on the land together with its word. On the archaeological side too, the analysis of fired clay balls unearthed in the Puuc region of Yucatan (Journal of Archaeological Science, 2013) points to the use of the earth oven in pre-Hispanic times, and heating marks rather than butchery marks on animal bone support the same. The ethnobotanical survey of the village of Xocen (Economic Botany, 2012) shows a continuity of earth-oven use with native plants and animals.

So the earth-oven pib technique and the layer of native game and fowl have their roots in the pre-Hispanic period, while cochinita pibil, made with pork, is set apart as a separate layer laid over it from the colonial period onward.