They Knew How To Produce Rubber Before Vulcanization

Agriculture was varied and complex among the Maya. Shifting cultivation techniques such as slash-and-burn, elevated fields, terracing, intensive gardening, woodland gardens, and managed fallows were among them. Maize, beans, and squashes were the Maya diet's mainstays. Amaranth, chili peppers, sweet potatoes, manioc, tobacco and chaya, cotton, cocoa, and vanilla are among the other crops grown. Cotton was spun, coloured, and woven into costly textiles in order to be traded as early as 500 BC. Cacao was utilized to make chocolate beverages as early as 500 BC. To make rubber, the Maya combined latex from rubber trees with juice from morning glory vines. Rubber was first used in Mesoamerica around 1600 BCE, several millennia before vulcanization was invented in the nineteenth century. The Maya, like various other Mesoamerican societies, played the famed Mesoamerican Ballgame with bouncy rubber balls.

According to historical and archaeological evidence, the Mesoamericans were big users of rubber. Sandals, rubber bands, and balls were all created from it, and they used it to play a ceremonial game on stone-walled courts. Each of these objects necessitates different properties in the rubber used to create it. For bounciness, a ball needs elasticity, a rubber band needs strength, and a sandal needs wear and resistance. According to a new study, the Mesoamericans, who include the Aztec and Maya, knew how to produce several types of rubber by combining latex from rubber trees with morning glory vine juice in various amounts.