Chia — an oil trade printed in Nahuatl in 1571, and the crop that nearly disappeared
Molina's 1571 dictionary gives chia its own vocabulary: the seed, the oil, the verb for pressing it, the presser, the maker, the seller, and the verb for varnishing an object with it. The 1615 Quatro libros describes the toasted seed kept a whole year and stirred into water. A 2019 genome paper reports that after the conquest the crop was "almost eradicated" — and that its seed carries more alpha-linolenic acid than almost any food known.
Why this wins its question: Chia has enormous English-language coverage and effectively all of it is nutritional: omega-3 counts, pudding recipes, and a stock sentence about Aztecs using it as an energy food. None of it quotes a sixteenth-century page, and none of it can show what the crop actually was. This object prints eleven entries from one column of Molina's 1571 dictionary — seed, oil, press, make, presser, maker, seller, and a transitive verb for varnishing something with chia oil — which together describe an oil trade with named occupations, not a health food. It adds the 1615 preparation read from the scan, including the detail that the powder kept a whole year while the rival seed spoiled in days, and the trap that a word search for chia in that volume lands first on a different plant. Against these it sets the modern figure for alpha-linolenic acid and the finding that the crop was almost eradicated after the conquest, weighted down to the strength of its single hedged source and with the corroboration this corpus looked for and failed to find recorded as its own claim.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Molina's Vocabulario of 1571 records chia not as a curiosity but as an industry with its own trades. On page 19 of the Nahuatl-to-Castilian half stand "Chia. cierta semilla de que sacan azeite" and "Chian. lo mesmo es que chia"; "Chiamatl. azeite de chia"; the two verbs "Chiamachiua.ni. hazer azeite de chia" and "Chiamapatzca.ni. sacar azeite de chia"; and three occupational nouns beside them — "Chiamachiuhqui. azeitero que haze azeite de chia", "Chiamapatzcac. azeitero que saca azeite de chia" and "Chiamanamacac. azeitero que lo vende". A maker, a presser and a seller, each with a separate word.
The same column records what the oil was for, and it is not food. "Chiamauia.nitla. embarnizar algo con azeite de chia" gives Nahuatl a transitive verb for varnishing an object with chia oil. A drying oil with a named application verb implies a craft that used it habitually; the dictionary preserves the verb without describing the craft, and this object does not supply one.
A confection is listed on the same page: "Chiancaca. maçapan de la tierra", the local marzipan. The word survives in Mexican and Central American Spanish as chancaca. Molina's gloss is the reading recorded here; no claim is made about the modern word's exact descent from it.
The Quatro libros de la naturaleza, Mexico 1615, describes the preparation on leaf 136 with the precision of a working recipe: the drink is made from the seed of the chian "tostada en vn comal, ò caçuela moderadamente, y luego molida", the powder then kept "para todo el año", and when needed used "mezclado con agua, meneandolo siempre hasta que se ponga tan espesso, que sea agradable al gusto". A toasted, ground, year-storable staple powder, forty-four years after Molina printed the vocabulary.
The same leaf records a second, inferior preparation and says why it lost. Another drink called chiatzotzolatolle is made the same way from a somewhat larger seed of the same benefit, "pero à se de aduertir que esta simiente preparada muy breuemente se corrompe, y assi no se vssa tanto como de las otras". A colonial pharmacopoeia noting that one seed keeps for a year and the other spoils in days is recording shelf life as the thing that decided which one people used.
A caution about the word, recorded because a search for it lands here first. Chapter XIIII of libro tercero of the same 1615 volume, on leaf 126, is headed "de la llamada chichiantic de Coatlan" and describes a herb with nettle-like leaves, feathered leaf-stalks, square sarmentous stems and purple flowers, grown at Yauhtepec and Coatlan, astringent, used against flux. It is not the oilseed. As with quinua and the Polylepis tree, a hit on the string is not evidence about the crop until the chapter heading has been read.
What the crop had been. A 2019 comparative transcriptome study of cultivated and wild Salvia hispanica states that "in Pre-Columbian civilizations such as the Mayas and the Aztecs chia was as important as corn and bean", that it served as a food source from at least 3500 BC, and that it was extensively cultivated between 1500 and 900 BC "for consumption of its seeds as an energy source, and for medical, artistic and religious purposes". The artistic use named there is the one Molina's varnishing verb points at from the other end.
The cost, and it is the central fact about this plant. The same paper states that after the Spanish conquest "the cultivation of chia was almost eradicated, probably due to European interests in other Mesoamerican crops and because of its sacred symbolism", with consequent loss of traditional knowledge and rapid disappearance of wild and domesticated populations. Confidence is set at 0.7 and not higher for two stated reasons: the sentence is the paper's introductory history rather than its own research, and it hedges its own causal claim with "probably". A crop that a Spanish dictionary and a Spanish-licensed pharmacopoeia documented in detail is also a crop the colonial order is said to have nearly ended, and both belong on the record.
What the seed contains. The 2019 paper puts the alpha-linolenic acid fraction of chia oil at 56 to 64 per cent and calls the seeds among the food sources with the highest omega-3 and omega-6 content. A 2012 review gives the seed 25 to 40 per cent oil, of which about 60 per cent is omega-3 alpha-linolenic acid and 20 per cent omega-6 linoleic acid. Two independent statements of the same figure, from papers with no common authorship.
A second cost, measured rather than narrated. The same transcriptome study reports that genetic diversity is higher in wild accessions of chia than in commercial domesticated ones, the wild populations retaining most of the variation. The plant that came back as a commodity came back narrower than the plant that nearly disappeared.
The gap this object cannot close, named. The 1571 and 1615 printings show the trade at work — pressers, sellers, a year's stored powder — and the modern paper reports the crop's near-disappearance, but nothing read here documents the two centuries between them, and no source consulted gives a date, a decree or a region for the collapse. The 2012 review was opened on 2026-08-17 specifically to corroborate the historical account and contains none of it. The decline is therefore carried by a single hedged sentence in one paper, and is stated at that strength and no more.