A thousand years ago, feasts in what’s now northern Georgia (in the US) included cacao from Central America.
Potsherds discarded after an 11th-century feast at Etowah—an Indigenous city just north of what’s now Atlanta, Georgia—contained traces of cacao, a raw ingredient of chocolate. The chemical residue and ancient DNA reveal that not only did the Mississippian people who built the city have excellent taste, they also had trade connections that reached at least 3,000 kilometers to Central America. And in a sense, chocolate may have helped build the Mississippian mounds.
Ancient dirty dishes
University of South Carolina archaeologist Adam King and his colleagues found fragments of ancient DNA from Theobroma cacao in the inner surfaces of potsherds from long-ago feasts at Etowah. Fruit from the cacao tree contains beans that, when dried and roasted, produce chocolate in all its glorious forms. Cacao only grows in the tropics, which means the nearest actual cacao trees would have been at least a 3,000-kilometer trek away from the woodlands of the eastern US. And that means the Mississippian people who lived in Etowah must have had continent-spanning trade connections.
Etowah was a major center of the Mississippian culture, which flourished in the southeastern U.S. in the centuries before colonization. By 1350 CE, wooden palisades and guard towers ringed a trio of giant earthen mounds (and three smaller ones), the largest of which stood six stories high and covered three acres. Log temples atop the mounds overlooked wide plazas for ball games, ceremonies, and open-air markets. The feast that King and his colleagues studied dates to two centuries before Etowah’s heyday, during the building of the first big platform mound.
After digging up a huge quantity of dirt for that mound (a 19 meter-high mound with a base area of 3 acres has a volume of… math), people filled in a pit with refuse from community feasts, including a lot of broken pottery, much to the delight of future archaeologists, who categorically love broken pottery. And because nobody washed the dishes before tossing them into the feasting pit, King and his colleagues (in a 2017 study) could analyze the microscopic residue of ancient drinks that had soaked into the ceramic.