E-mail Story
Print Friendly
Send E-mail
Reprint story
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Chaco residents drank chocolate, UNM scientist discovers
By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
Add this to the signs of our common humanity: The Anasazi, prehistoric residents of northwestern New Mexico, enjoyed chocolate.
A University of New Mexico archaeologist and a chemist with the Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition have found traces of chocolate in clay vessels dumped in a Chaco Canyon trash heap more than 800 years ago.
It is the first evidence ever found of prehistoric chocolate use north of the Mexican border and provides new evidence of prehistoric trade patterns across the Americas. The discovery is being published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Beyond the fact that it was probably a cocoa drink of some kind, the details remain a mystery. It was likely a precious luxury, with the beans hand-carried from the jungles of Central America. But did they sweeten it, or add the subtle flavorings that make elegant foods based on the cacao bean such a delicious treat today?
Archaeologist Patricia Crown will talk about her discovery today at the Student Union Building at 11 a.m. and brew up a sample of a cocoa treat of the type that may have been drunk by prehistoric people.
Crown teamed up with Jeff Hurst, a Hershey researcher who has lent his chemistry expertise to a series of archaeological efforts to trace the history of chocolate around the world.
It has long been known that chocolate came from the New World. The first Spanish visitors to Central America described a frothy liquid treat, with the foam "the most desirable part of the drink," according to Hurst.
Improved technology for chemical analysis has allowed scientists to identify trace amounts of substances, and Hurst has turned those tools to the task of deciphering chocolate's history.
Most of Hurst's work involves the more prosaic study of chocolate manufacturing processes. But for nearly two decades, he has also been teaming up with archaeologists to study the use of chocolate in prehistoric societies, he said in a telephone interview.
In 2002, he and a group of colleagues from the University of Texas identified chocolate residues on ceramics from Mayan ruins dating to 600 B.C.
But until Crown teamed up with Hurst, no one had found evidence of chocolate north of the Mexican border.
Crown laughed in an interview when she explained why no one had found chocolate this far north. "It's the first time anybody's looked," she said.
The chocolate-stained pot fragment came from a UNM excavation of an old trash mound at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. Crown has long been interested in a particular type of ceramic jar found at Chaco, about the size and shape of a tall drinking glass.
Some have bits of plaster on them, similar to jars found in Mayan ruins in Central America. Archaeologists have found traces of chocolate on the Mayan jars, and Crown wondered whether the similar jars at Chaco could have been used for the same thing.
"Most people just laughed," Crown recalled. "They thought it was silly."
But the idea of trade goods making their way from Central America to Chaco is not far-fetched. Archaeologists have found the remains of macaws, a tropical bird, along with copper bells.
"If they could get birds — live birds — from Meso-America, they should have been able to get beans," Crown said.
So she carefully ground up a sample of one of the Chaco fragments and sent it off to Hurst to analyze in his Hershey, Pa., lab.
The results came back last fall — a positive hit for theobromine, a chemical unique to chocolate. The plant grows only in tropical climates, suggesting that someone must have carried it to Chaco, half a continent away.
There is no way to know at this point how the chocolate was prepared, Crown said. More detailed analyses of the Mayan samples suggests that they added other flavorings to their cocoa drinks, including corn meal, honey, chile and vanilla. That sort of analysis has yet to be done on the Chaco samples, so Crown can only guess.
It was likely a bitter drink, she said, far from the sweet, gentle cocoas of today, and no one knows for sure why prehistoric people drank it.
Crown said that demonstrating that residents of Chaco drank chocolate is only the beginning. Similar tests can now be done for other archaeological sites.
"Is it only in Chaco?" she asked.
You also can send comments via our comment form
|
|
