box filled with soil for cultivating vegetables; and a wooden grill where the natives would cure their meats over fire and smoke.

But in Mexico, for some unknown reason, the term barbacoa was applied by the Spaniards to the pit or earth oven used by the local indigenous people for cooking or roasting all kinds of foods. As a result from this discrepancy, a new hypothesis has been proposed that argues that the term barbacoa, as used in Mexico, originates not from the Taíno term but from the Mayan