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Archaeologists push back date for earliest cacao beverages

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photo by USDA - ARS

They were drinking chocolate (of a sort) in 1150 BC

by Eric Jackson

Scientists from Cornell, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and the Hershey Foods Technical Center have published a paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that pushes back the date when we know that cacao beverages were being used by at least 500 years.

John S. Henderson, Rosemary A. Joyce, Gretchen R. Hall, W. Jeffrey Hurst, and Patrick E. McGovern report that residues found in pottery vessels found near Puerto Escondido, Honduras turn out to be remnants of a beverage that was probably made by fermenting the pulp inside the cacao (Theobroma cacao and related species) pod some 3,000 years ago. When European conquerors came to the Americas, they found the locals drinking a beverage and eating other concoctions made from the roasted seeds within the pod. The Aztecs called the cacao seed beverage chocolatl, and thus the word "chocolate," but chocolate as most of us know it includes milk and sugar, both Old World foods that were brought to the Americas in the Conquest.

Archaeologists digging at Puerto Escondido, a relatively prosperous village a little ways up the Ulua River from the Caribbean coast of Honduras, found many levels of debris from pre-Columbian and post-Conquest human occupation of the site. Down toward the bottom, from when settled agricultural life was beginning in the region, they found pottery sherds which they had chemically analyzed. More than a dozen of these artifacts yielded the residues of theobromine or caffeine. The oldest of these was radiocarbon dated to around 1050 BC (which because of a margin of error might be a few decades earlier or later) and culturally dated by the pottery type and surrounding artifacts to the Ocotillo phase of the local culture, which lasted from about 1400 to about 1000 BC.

Alcohol evaporates rather quickly and thus the scientists can't prove with certainty that the vessels contained the fermented beverage. The non-alcoholic chocolate drink made from the seeds also leaves residues of theobromine and caffeine. However, the latter stuff is frothy, and the pottery found at Puerto Escondido was narrow-necked bottles inappropriate for being filled with or serving a drink with froth and thus presumed to have been used for the alcoholic concoction instead. This would jibe with anthropologists' findings in South American indigenous cultures in which alcoholic beverages are or were brewed from the pulp of seed pods of plants related to Theobroma cacao, and with the general archaeological record of humanity's early appreciation of alcohol. Also supporting the scientists' presumption about alcohol brewed from the pulp is the widening of vessel necks in later pottery found at the site, in such a way as to be more practical for the serving of frothy hot chocolate made from the seeds.

"The results of this project trace a previously unsuspected time depth and complexity in the history of one of the major luxury commodities in the world today," the researchers concluded.

Also in this section:
Living with chronic lung diseases
Archaeologists push back date for earliest cacao beverages

Asia's disappearing tropical forests