Earliest use of chocolate in North America discovered
Some strange pottery found at an ancient settlement in southeastern Utah contains the oldest known traces of chocolate in the United States, an anthropologist says.
The site dates back to the 8th century -- 200 years earlier than the only other known evidence of the food, found at Chaco Canyon, the famous ceremonial and trade center of the Ancestral Puebloans.
The residents of the Utah settlement, known as Alkali Ridge, were also Pueblo ancestors, but the chocolate found in so many of their jars, pitchers, and bowls -- as well as the pottery itself -- suggests that they might not have been alone.
Dr. Dorothy Washburn, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, studied the residues in 18 vessels first unearthed at one of the settlement's sites in the 1930s. She and her team -- including her husband, a chemist for Bristol-Meyers Squibb -- found that 13 of the artifacts contained traces of cacao, also known as cocoa.
The tell was a chemical called theobromine, a compound like caffeine that cacao has in abundance. The only other plant in North America that produces theobromine is Ilex vomitoria, a toxic holly that some Midwestern cultures used to induce ritual vomiting.
But the holly, Washburn said, is only found in the Southeastern United States, whereas cacao was a known staple of life and trade in Mesoamerica.
"The only conclusion can be that it’s cacao," she said.
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