Mystery of Ancient Pueblo Jars Is Solved

[Adsos Letter]

Source: New York Times
By MICHAEL HAEDERLE
Published: February 3, 2009

ALBUQUERQUE — For years Patricia Crown puzzled over the cylindrical clay jars found in the ruins at Chaco Canyon, the great complex of multistory masonry dwellings set amid the arid mesas of northwestern New Mexico. They were utterly unlike other pots and pitchers she had seen.



Tests of jars found in the ruins of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico confirmed the presence of theobromine, a cacao marker.
Some scholars believed that Chaco’s inhabitants, ancestors of the modern Pueblo people of the Southwest, had stretched skins across the cylinders and used them for drums, while others thought they held sacred objects.

But the answer is simpler, though no less intriguing, Ms. Crown asserts in a paper published Tuesday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the jars were used for drinking liquid chocolate. Her findings offer the first proof of chocolate use in North America north of the Mexican border.

How did the ancient Pueblos come to have cacao beans in the desert, more than 1,200 miles from the nearest cacao trees? Ms. Crown, a University of New Mexico anthropologist, noted that maize, beans and corn spread to the Southwest after being domesticated in southern Mexico. Earlier excavations at Pueblo Bonito, the largest structure in the Chaco complex, had found scarlet macaws and other imported items.

Dorie Reents-Budet, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and a Smithsonian Institution research associate specializing in Mayan cylinder vases, said that a sophisticated Mesoamerican trade network extended to Chaco in the north and as far south as Ecuador and Colombia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/us/04cocoa.html?_r=1&em

[PufPuf23]

1. Thanks

I like these anthropological posts.

[Adsos Letter]

2. We are all anthropologists here....

sort of... :D

[Jane Austin]

6. Me, too!

Thanks, Adsos.

[depakid]

3. Must.have.chocolate

[janx]

4. Interesting! Thanks for posting this. I have printed it for a friend who

works at the Pueblo museum in Albuquerque, and I've been to Chaco and other dwellings but have never seen pots of that structure!

[MichaelHarris]

5. If they traded

with the Irish they would have some Bailey's to go with that chocolate.

[Orangeone]

7. Interesting

There's evidence that the Chaco Canyon people practiced human sacrifice or cannibalism. The fact that they found chocolate reinforces the idea that they may have come from Mesoamerica...