John Henderson

Today in virtually any corner of the world, we can respond to sudden cravings for sweets, and to the angst of modern life, with chocolate. It was not always so.

In 1500, chocolate was known only in what is now Mexico and Central America, where it was a focus not only of social life but of medical practice as well. How the cacao tree, whose wild ancestors are native to the tropical forests of South America, came to be the most valuable cash crop in Mesoamerica is a long and still largely obscure story; but archaeologists from Cornell and Berkeley working in Honduras may have turned up an early piece of the puzzle.

In nutritional terms maize is easily the most important of the many foods that Mesoamerican cultivators gave to the world; but chocolate is the one that we appreciate most. As did the Aztec emperor. Bernal Diaz, a soldier with the invading Spanish force, tells us that Motecuhzoma's servants "brought him in cups of pure gold a drink made from the cocoa-plant, which they said he took before visiting his wives … I saw them bring in a good fifty large jugs … all frothed up of which he would drink a little. They always served it with great reverence."

Chocolatl - the Aztec word for the drink, and the source of our word chocolate - enriched just about every kind of social occasion and solemnized all sorts of rituals as well, but it was far more likely to be flavored with spicy chili peppers than to be sweetened. It was also widely used as a medicine, again in the form of a drink (solid chocolate is a recent European innovation).

It was the imagined curative properties of cacao that led to its initial popularity with Europeans. What chocoholics now lament as its major drawback was one of chocolate's chief attractions for early modern physicians, who prescribed it to help emaciated patients gain weight. By 1631, chocolate was being touted as a substance that "… vehemently incites to Venus, and causeth conception in women, hastens and facilitates their delivery; it is an excellent help to digestion, it cures consumptions, and the cough of the lungs, the New Disease, or plague of the guts and other fluxes, the green sicknesse, jaundice, and all manner of inflammations and obstructions. It quite takes away the morpheus, cleaneth the teeth, and sweeteneth the breath, provokes urine, cures the [kidney] stone, and expels poison, and preserves from all infectious diseases." Linnaeus dubbed it theobroma, food of the gods.

So valuable was cacao in ancient Mesoamerica that the beans served as a standard of value in markets throughout the region (a fact that produced the best dissertation title ever, "When Money Grew on Trees"). The coastal areas where cacao grew best were sources of incredible wealth.

One of these areas was the lower Ulúa river valley in northern Honduras, where Rosemary Joyce '78 (Berkeley) and I have been digging for the last two decades. When the Spaniards invaded the region, the king of Chetumal, some 200 miles distant up the coast of Yucatan, so valued his interests in Ulúa cacao plantations that he sent a fleet of war canoes commanded by a renegade Spaniard to defend the valley against the newcomers.

Much older depictions of cacao from the valley seemed to confirm our belief that the 16th century fame of the valley's cacao plantations had deep historical roots, but tracing its evolution was not a top priority for us, in part because of the difficulty of finding plant remains in such a tropical environment. The unexpected discovery of one of the earliest settled villages in Mesoamerica changed all that.

Deep levels at Puerto Escondido show that around 1000 BC, the valley was part of the social and economic world of the Olmecs, the first civilized society in Mesoamerica, creators of the famous colossal heads from Mexico's Gulf coast. The Olmecs are often credited with developing the cacao-serving complex and spreading it throughout Mesoamerica. The basis for that claim is a complicated argument from historical linguistics - there is no direct evidence of Olmec cacao - but it is certainly plausible that Ulúa valley was already producing cacao and that that was responsible for its participation in the Olmec world. Thinking along those lines led us to the realization that the distinctive Olmec pottery style centered on a suite of vessels that must have been used for serving food and drink on special occasions. The special-occasion beverage of choice for all later Mesoamerican peoples was cacao, and the vessels used to store, mix, and serve it are very much like our early jars, bowls, and cups.

Digging deeper, we discovered that Puerto Escondido had already been occupied for more than 500 years by Olmec times. The pottery from these levels - as early as any in Mesoamerica - is in no way primitive, nor was it strictly utilitarian. Instead, our early vessels are very thin-walled bowls and bottles for food-serving, beautifully made and decorated. They, like their later Olmec counterparts, were created to provide fancy serving vessels for feasts.

Archaeologists working on the Pacific coast of Mexico have documented exactly the same sequence of events: the two areas with the earliest evidence of villages and identical fancy pottery in Mesoamerica are the Ulúa valley and Soconusco, the two premier cacao growing centers of later Mesoamerica. The Ulúa valley is much closer to the South American homeland of cacao, so we are also thinking about how cacao might have been introduced into Mesoamerica. This is not as simple as imagining communication routes, since cacao was never cultivated in South America, nor was the elaborate process of fermenting, drying, roasting, grinding, mixing with liquid, and frothing required to make the Chocolatl drink known there. How then would cacao become a focus of Ulúa feasts? We suspect that the answer is that cacao was initially used to make chicha, a fermented drink, as it certainly was in later times in South America. An intoxicant would have contributed in obvious ways to the effectiveness of feasts, and this theory has the additional virtue of suggesting how the fermentation essential to chocolate production might have originated. (Besides, the concept of chocolate beer has an inherent appeal.)

All of this is, of course, speculation based on circumstantial evidence, what we would like to have is direct evidence of cacao itself. Palæobotanists are now busy combing through the soil samples we have collected from locations in the site that might have preserved plant parts, but that is a long shot. More promising is the possibility of detecting the chemical fingerprints of chocolate in some of these early vessels. Chocolate residues have been identified in intact vessels from later sites, but our pottery is fragmentary, so we must wait until methods for extracting residues from liquids that soaked into the pores of vessels are developed - or until our excavations turn up complete vessels.

Meanwhile, we think of our argument about the possible early importance of cacao in the Ulúa valley as a hypothesis that our ongoing research is intended to test.

John Henderson '67 is a professor of anthropology at Cornell University. He has taught anthropology and archæology at Cornell since 1971, served as director of Cornell's archæology program for ten years, and has written or edited seven books, including The World of the Ancient Maya, a popular introduction to ancient Maya civilization. Henderson's 25 seasons of excavation experience have been mainly in Mexico and Central America, but he has also dug in the United States, Peru, Turkey and Cyprus.

Drawings on these pages represent Olmec period serving vessels from the lower Ulúa volley in Honduras and are by Yolanda Tovar.