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Ancient Pottery Reveals the Earliest Known Traces of Chocolate East of the Mississippi, Painting a Picture of Connection in the Americas
A new archaeological discovery suggests that people in present-day Georgia have feasted with cacao for 1,000 years
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The pleasure of chocolate carried across the continent may have fueled the builders of earthen monuments in Georgia a millennium ago. A new genetic analysis of residues left behind on pieces of pottery near the Etowah Indian Mounds has revealed the earliest known traces of cacao east of the Mississippi River, expanding archaeologists’ understanding of the spread of goods and ideas in the ancient Americas.
“The Indigenous world of the Southeast was an international world, where people were very connected,” says Adam King, an archaeologist at the University of South Carolina.
Cacao, which produces beans that are fermented and roasted to create chocolate, originated in Mesoamerica. Some of the earliest evidence for the plant’s domestication dates to about 5,300 years ago in Ecuador. By 1500 B.C.E., the Olmecs of southern Mexico were making fermented chocolate drinks. Cacao beans were even used as a currency by the Maya in the Classic Period, and in 1050 C.E., chocolate was widespread in the region.
But only limited evidence from the time had identified the substance in North America. The new discovery, published on August 26 in PLOS One, reveals that the magic beans had somehow reached Etowah by around the 11th century.
Today, sitting just northwest of Atlanta, Etowah hosts six earthen monuments created by Native Americans during the pre-Columbian Mississippian period. The tallest of them once rose about 64 feet high, King says, and was built with red clay between 1000 and 1550 C.E. Pyramid-like mounds were also sculpted by the people of Cahokia in southern Illinois, who created the famous, 100-foot-tall Monks Mound.
King says that at Etowah, the building of these structures was likely highly ritualized—the mounds themselves may have symbolized our planet. “They are actually re-enacting the creation of the Earth,” he says. By building or adding to the structure, the Mississippians were symbolically placing themselves within the cosmos.
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It wasn’t all heavy lifting, though. The Mississippians likely celebrated the completion of a mound with a large feast. In the 1950s, archaeologists found the remains of such a feast marking one of the earliest phases of mound building at Etowah, sometime between 1050 and 1150 C.E. The remnants, which included animal bones and pottery fragments, were discovered in a borrow pit—a hole generated by the mining of red clay for the mounds. After the Mississippians mined clay from these pits, they filled them back up with other dirt and trash—in this case, the remains of the feast. The archaeologists washed the pieces of pottery, known as sherds, and stored them for decades. But luckily, the artifacts retained some traces of what the vessels once contained.
About a decade ago, King and his colleague Terry Powis, an archaeologist who’d been studying cacao use in Mesoamerica, wanted to see if these sherds held the remains of chocolate. They got permission from the Muscogee people, who hold Etowah sacred, to analyze residue from the bits of pottery. Their study identified four organic compounds found in cacao, including caffeine, which was present in all 31 sherds they tested.
But cacao isn’t the only plant native to the Americas that carries caffeine. Several American holly species also contain the stimulant, including the yerba mate consumed in South America. In what is now the U.S. Southeast, Indigenous people drank tea made from the native yaupon holly. Based on their residue analysis, the team couldn’t tell if the caffeine came from cacao or yaupon holly. They concluded that it was likely the latter due to its prevalence in the region, though they didn’t have hard proof.
More recently, King and Powis teamed up with French researchers to do genetic analysis on the artifacts in hopes of solving the open question. In their new study, they reported traces of cacao DNA in two of the pot sherds.
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The team ensured that the cacao DNA wasn’t just a case of contamination—of, perhaps, archaeologists handling the ancient pottery after eating a Snickers bar. The cacao’s DNA quality had deteriorated in a way consistent with leaving your snack around for a millennium, suggesting it did not have a present-day source.
“They take a lot of care to talk about why they don’t think it’s modern contamination, which you have to worry about with DNA,” says archaeologist Barbara Mills, a professor emerita at the University of Arizona who was not involved in King’s study. “I thought they did a really great job.”
Perhaps the most surprising thing, however, was how far Etowah is from the nearest area where cacao was cultivated: The trees thrive in tropical, lowland areas such as southern Mexico.
It’s unclear how the cacao came to Etowah. A trader or traveler could have brought it there directly, King says, or it could have been traded from person to person until it arrived.
Maybe it made a pit stop on the way: A few years ago, researchers found cacao residue in ceramic vessels in Pueblo Bonito, a Chaco Canyon site in New Mexico. The Ancestral Puebloan society there used these vessels around the same time that people of the Mississippian culture used the ceramic pots with cacao residue in Etowah. Follow-up analysis revealed more potential traces of cacao in other parts of the U.S. Southwest.
It’s possible that the cacao beans used to make the chocolate drink consumed in Etowah came via trade from the Chaco Canyon. “There are continental scale trade networks,” says Mills, who has studied ceramics in Chaco Canyon.
It’s also possible that the cacao was traded along the Gulf Coast, King says, or it may have come via the Caribbean and up through Florida. It’s difficult to say because not much evidence of Mesoamerican influence, other than the cultivation of maize, can be found in Etowah.
Did you know? The invention of chocolate bars
Any chocolate consumed during pre-Columbian times would have likely been a drink—and much more bitter than today’s hot chocolate. The solid chocolate bar is a more recent invention, with the first modern one attributed to Joseph Fry in 1847.
A prepared chocolate drink would likely not have lasted all the way from Mesoamerica to the U.S. Southeast. Cacao beans, on the other hand, have a long shelf life, says Anabel Ford, an archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has studied the Maya for decades but was not involved with King’s work. “Cacao is dried and, if stable, can endure for a long time,” she says.
As a result, whoever brought the cacao probably also came with a recipe for chocolate. In the Maya world, chocolate was often consumed ritually, and Mills says that the Chaco Canyon vessels with cacao residue also suggest ritual use. Still, the degree to which the Maya rituals were transmitted to Etowah isn’t clear. The vessels in which cacao was found at Etowah are different from Maya or Ancestral Puebloan vessels, so it’s difficult to say how they were used other than in the context of a feast. The Etowah vessels are unique, created by stamping prints onto the pots using special paddles. “Those are some of the most intriguing designs that people have made in the Mississippi area,” Mills says.
For King, this discovery reveals how well the Americas were connected a millennium ago. It also opens an old argument. Archaeologists used to believe that the design of the big, flattened mounds of the Mississippian culture was borrowed from Mesoamerican pyramids. That idea gradually fell out of favor with archaeologists due to a lack of further evidence of connection between these two cultural areas. Plus, the theory had an inherent suggestion that Mississippian people couldn’t have figured out how to build a mound by themselves.
But this discovery of cacao opens the possibility that at least some degree of connection occurred between Georgia and Central America 1,000 years ago. Kinship networks and trade relationships “were much broader and much more connected than we think they were,” King says. “This is really an Americas story.”
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