Mayans Sought Wine Not Chocolate
Cacao Fruits Probably Fermented for Wine
Researchers say the Mayans were making wine when they first used the fruit of cacao plants, and chocolate came a lot later.
Researchers at Cornell University Department of Anthropology say recent finds of pottery shards at archaeological digs in the Ulúa Valley region of northern Honduras, suggest the early Mayans valued cacao as the source of a fermented drink.
Although the love of chocolate is documented as at least at least 3,000 years old, it seems it might have been an accidental discovery, resulting from the Mayans fermenting a drink from the pulp of the cacao fruit.
Alcohol 500 Years Earlier than Chocolate
The pottery pieces, dating from 1100 B.C, 500 years earlier than the first known reference to chocolate, showed traces of caffeine and theobromine.
In research published in the November 27 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cornell Professor of Anthropology John Henderson reported on the theobromine traces on 11 pottery shards, which came from excavations directed by Professor Henderson and University of California-Berkeley anthropology Professor Rosemary Joyce at a site known as Puerto Escondido.
Theobromine is an alkaloid similar to caffeine but specific to cacao. The findings offer chemical evidence for the earliest cacao consumption anywhere in the world.
New Extraction and Analysis Techniques
Not only was this the first evidence of cacao consumption, it was the first time theobromine had been detected from broken pottery. Previously, chemical detection of cacao in ancient pottery required an intact vessel and a substantial amount of residue, Professor Henderson said.
New extraction techniques along with liquid chromatography, gas chromatography and mass spectrometry were used by study co-authors Dr Patrick E. McGovern and Gretchen Hall at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and W. Jeffrey Hurst at Hershey Foods to obtain and analyze the theobromine traces.
Professor Henderson said these sensitive chemical testing techniques would become increasingly useful. "It's not very often that you find a whole vessel. Now that you can process things from people's trash piles, you can see in much better context how these things were being used."
However, he said it was unlikely the first cacao-based drink was the frothy chocolate drink for which the Mayans became famous.
Wine a Status Symbol
He said it's likely that the earliest cacao drinkers made a simple drink by fermenting the pulp around the seeds. The result, according to Dr McGovern was a sweetish brew of about 5 percent alcohol content that tasted nothing like chocolate. (At least one brewing company, in collaboration with Dr McGovern, is attempting to reproduce the Mayan ‘wine’.)
The shape of the pottery shards indicated that these containers were nothing like the jugs of later, chocolate-drinking periods, which were short and wide, with broad openings to allow for pouring back and forth to create froth. The earliest bottles had long, skinny spouts more suited for pouring out liquid and holding back the pulp.
Professor Henderson said the fermented drink would have been a status symbol that was traded, shared and used in ceremonies.
"The upwardly mobile families were using cacao, serving it as part of a strategy for distinguishing themselves," he said. "It was a way of creating social obligation and political power locally and with people in distant villages.
“It's that context that gives us a way of understanding how it is that potters in villages hundreds of miles apart have the same understanding of what vessels should look like."
Chocolate an Accidental Discovery?
Over the ensuing centuries, people likely discovered that the fermented seeds, not the pulp, made the headier, more powerful drink.
"If we're right about the shift from wine made from pulp to chocolate made from seeds," said Henderson, "the control of cacao plantations by kings and chiefs, all the fancy serving of chocolate in the Aztec courts that so impressed the Spaniards, and the modern chocolate industry that developed from that -- all that was an unintended consequence of some early brewing."
See also: Neolithic Toolkit Found in Jordan
