This drawing shows a Barraca brown burnished type bottle from an unidentified site in northern Honduras that corresponds to a type produced between 1400 and 1100 B.C. at Puerto Escondido. The bottle is part of a collection at the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia, Museo de San Pedro Sula in Honduras. (Courtesy of Yolanda Tovar)
Chocolate, who doesn't love chocolate? Well, thanks to the Meso-american Natives, we can enjoy anything from a chocolate bar, to a frothy hot chocolate. According to new discoveries in Puerto Escondido, Honduras, Chocolate was probably being consumed at around 1,400 B.C. instead of 600 B.C. as previously thought. That's a heck of a lot of years; about 3,500 years old tradition.
The favorite form of consumption was of course as a fermented drink, and is thought to have been used at special occasions by the elite and royalty; because cacao was valuable in those days (no $.99 chocolate bars at the store). As always, the rich get the longer end of the stick :)
Chocolate drinks - probably fermented ones - popular long before previously thought, says anthropologist
By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations | 13 November 2007
BERKELEY – Mesoamerican menus featured cacao beverages - probably fermented ones - at least as early as 1100 B.C., some 500 years earlier than previously documented anywhere, according to new research published in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...
"The findings of this study take us near the time of the probable initial use of cacao in Mesoamerica," they write about cacao's introduction to the region of Central America and southern Mexico that was home to Olmec, Mayan and Aztec civilizations. A previous investigation confirmed the earliest consumption of cacao at 600 B.C. in Belize.
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/11/13_cacao.shtml
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