172 Book Reviews 'TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE For the historian of technology, this book also raises more questions than it answers. With a few exceptions, technology is too often treated as a black box. New inventions seem to appear felicitously at regular intervals without the aid of human agents—inventors or profiteers. Moreover, their workings, past what is common knowledge, remain mysterious. The held of communications technologies seems a par ticularly appropriate one for asking questions about failed technolo gies, technological limitations, and the relationship between the market and the inventor. Despite its shortcomings, A Culturefor Democracy fills a unique spot in the literature. It will undoubtedly be the source of much interesting and important future work. Arwen Mohun Ms. Mohun is a doctoral candidate in the Program in History of Technology and Science at Case Western Reserve University. Her current work is on technological change and the culture of work in early-20th-century Britain. Food, Conquest, and Colonization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America. By John C. Super. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. Pp. viii+133; notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 (cloth); $11.95 (paper). In Food, Conquest, and Colonization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish Amer ica, John C. Super asks an important question: Did changes in early colonial food production cause widespread hunger in the New World? Super challenges conventional wisdom that hunger in early colonial Spanish America was widespread. Using historical and archi val sources that provide information on ratios of seed to yields, dietary practices and changes, livestock figures, disease, demographic statistics, and general commentaries on state of health, he undertakes a meticulous “food analysis” to argue that New World populations in the first years after contact did not go hungry. He does not draw on archaeological evidence of any kind. Despite one excellent chapter and the interesting data he some times uncovers, his argument fails for two reasons. First, although Super realizes that determining the reliability of colonial documen tary sources is a tricky business, he takes them at face value. An extraordinary number ofcolonial commentators and chroniclers were busy fabricating their own political agendas. Furthermore, they often reported the marvelous and odd but were blind to the details of the ordinary and habitual. Super ignores significant sources that did take account of daily Native American dietary fare, in particular Guaman Poma de Ayala’s (1584—1613) chronicle. Second, Super seeks to apply his argument to all of Latin America, but generalizes from data he has gathered from different regions with little attention to their climatic, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 173 dietary, and cultural peculiarities. Given the limitations of the data— debates over New World population figures and decline alone have continued for more than a century—it might have been wiser for Super to confine himself to a single region and to evaluate his sources far more carefully. European conquerors were indeed fortunate to find lands in the New World conducive to raising Old World livestock and to growing wheat in large quantities. The diversity of fruits and vegetables that became available to the Spaniards was impressive. Nevertheless, the cornucopia of nutritional blessings that accompanied the Spanish invasion was not made available indiscriminately to the entire popu lation of Spanish America. Super naively assumes an equivalence between abundance of food and the absence of widespread hunger. Famines are usually a problem of distribution, not of supply. For example, his statement that “The introduction of new foods, espe cially animal fats and proteins, more than compensated for any loss of Indian staples” is misleading (p. 57). (He cites Gibson’s statement on the Indian’s love of beef and adds that, although Gibson wrote of the Valley of Mexico, this could be applied to most of Spanish America.) Indian populations may have accommodated to new tastes in food with relative ease, but despite an abundance of beef, Indians, at least in the Peruvian and Bolivian highlands, rarely gained access to it. It was reserved primarily for the higher-status Spaniards and Indian nobility. Faulty arguments and overgeneralization pervade the book. Super assumes maize to be a pre-conquest staple crop when, in the highland Andean region, it was primarily consumed by and grown for...