Mukbil pollo Period COrigin theory CVerified

Mukbil pollo is a large ceremonial tamal offered on the Day of the Dead, known in Yucatan as Hanal Pixán, in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Nixtamalized corn masa is filled with chicken and achiote, wrapped in leaves, and steamed in an underground oven called a pib. It is a food made once a year, prepared by whole households and communities together for the festival.

Corn, the heart of the dish, is a long-established crop of this land, on the everyday table since ancient times. Steaming a great tamal in an earth oven, making masa through nixtamalization, coloring with achiote, and preparing ceremonial food with turkey are all forms that reach back to the pre-Hispanic Maya. At El Mirador, turkeys are known to have been kept as early as the Late Preclassic, between roughly 300 BCE and 100 CE. To these older forms were joined the chicken and pork lard that came after the conquest, and the mukbil pollo of today took shape. The Spanish word pollo, "chicken," preserved in its name, is the mark of that history.

Two readings stand side by side over how mukbil pollo came to be, but both catch the same picture of history from different angles.

One holds that colonial-era elements fused onto a pre-Hispanic Maya ceremonial tamal baked in the pib. The great ceremonial tamal in the earth oven, the nixtamalized masa, the turkey, and the achiote are pre-Hispanic Maya forms; onto them were grafted the chicken, pork, and lard that arrived after the conquest of Yucatan, between 1527 and 1546. The very name, joining the Maya mukbil, "to bury," with the Spanish pollo, "chicken," mirrors that fusion. As the offering food of the Day of the Dead, its lineage continues to this day. The years in which turkeys were kept come from the work of Thornton and colleagues, who placed the remains found at El Mirador in the Late Preclassic.

The other reading attends to the present dish itself, the one that carries "chicken" in its name, and sees it as a dish that came into being in the colonial period. It treats the pib ceremonial tamal of the older Maya layer as something separate, and holds that the present form arose by taking in the chicken, pork, and lard the Spanish brought.

The two readings are only telling the same story of a Maya original and a colonial fusion, one stressing the older layer and the other the name of the present form.