A confession - I am partial to the occasional cup of hot chocolate. However, I rarely spend any time at all, thinking about the journey the chocolate undertook to make its way into my cup. Echoes of a much longer and much, much older chocolate expedition caught my attention this week. Researchers announced they had discovered theobromine a chocolate marker in the shards of ceramic drinking cylinders unearthed at the Chaco Canyon settlement in New Mexico.
This is the first evidence of chocolate beans journeying up from the Mayans in the Mexican lowlands to the American Southwest. Did the chocolate beans make their way to Chaco Canyon along a thriving trade route or did some chocoholic decide he (or she) couldn't possible do without their chocolate and brought a personal stash along with them on their journey. Archaeologists agree the ceramic vessels were used for ceremonial ritual but get fractious over any further theories. What hand hand held the tumbler; king, priest, citizen, male or female? We have the ceramic fragments along with tell-tale chemical markers, yet the human story remains elusive.
PS. Only around two hundred intact ceramic drinking vessels were found in the Pueblo Bonito settlement in Chaco Canyon by a the Hyde Exploring Expedition of 1896-1899 and the National geographic Society Expedition of 1920-1927. Today they reside in the Smithsonian Institution and the American Museum of Natural History (both fabulous museums!). http://www.unm.edu/~market/cgi-bin/archives/2009_02.html Image: Thousand year old chocolate drinking tumblers, University of New Mexico
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