CHOCOLATE'S COLORFUL HISTORY TRACES BACK TO ANCIENT MEXICO

The devilishly addictive treat like no other—chocolate—came from Mexico. Anthropologist Sophie Coe knew it, studied it, and wrote about it in The True History of Chocolate. In her book, Coe draws on botany, archeology, and culinary history to present chocolate's complete and accurate beginnings. "Essential reading for anthropologists as well as scholars in a variety of other disciplines, and Coe's book brings serious pleasure reading to lay readers who are cooks, eaters, and students of food ways," said a review in American Anthropologist.

CULINARY ANTHROPOLOGIST

Sophie Coe's interest in the food and drink of pre-Spanish peoples of the New World first inspired her to write America's First Cuisines in 1994. During that research, she discovered the important position given to chocolate in Mesoamerica. She became smitten with a love of chocolate's history since 1988 while preparing a paper titled "The Maya Chocolate Pot and Its Descendants" for a seminar. 

Unfortunately, Coe died before the book was finished. Having amassed thousands of pages of reference materials and having outlined the first eight chapters, so near and yet so far, she couldn't complete the task. Her husband, famed archeologist and Maya scholar Michael D. Coe, promised he would see it through to publication. 

MICHAEL COE STEPS IN

Cacao Pods After Harvest

In the introduction, Michael Coe explains that writing about food and drink has only become a 'respectable' and scholarly subject in recent decades, at least in the Western world, As a consequence, culinary history was left to amateur enthusiasts, he wrote, who usually promoted one food, drink, or cuisine.

Coe goes on to say that is especially the case with chocolate and the cacao from which it was manufactured. This is because the substance's origins lay in the cloudy area of New World pre-history and ethnographic-history. Sophie Coe's book on the subject is fascinating because as a culinary anthropologist, she looked at her subject with a worldwide view. And along with husband Michael Coe, archeologist, we the reader could not have a better pair to guide us through the long, fascinating world of cacao and its origins.

Sophie Coe (By SophieCoePrize.com)

Sophie had spent hundreds of hours in both American and European libraries tracking down all possible references to chocolate and cacao as well as vast amounts of time in her husband's enormous Mesoamerican library for her research. With her scientific background and a doctorate in anthropology, she left no stone unturned.

After her death in 1994 Michael continued to organize her notes. Even though the first chapters had been outlined, the book did not see the light of day until 2003. The second edition came out in 2013 bearing a wealth of new information not only on cacao and chocolate, but what it meant to ancient Mesoamerican cultures, thanks to the recent decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic texts. 

CACAO FOUND IN BURIAL SITES

Cacao Glyph in Mayan

One thing that was determined in the decade between the book's first and second publication was this: the royal and noble occupant of every Maya tomb went to the next world accompanied by Mesoamerica's most valued drink. This is known due to numerous pyramid site excavations in recent years that have given archeologists an abundance of insights into the importance of chocolate to these civilizations.

The cacao tree, named Theobroma cacao in the 1700s, is picky. It refuses to bear fruit outside a latitude of 20 degrees north or south of the equator. Nor is it happy with this tropical range if the altitude is too high— it will shed its leaves. It's a magnet to rodents of all kinds—squirrels, monkeys, rats—who steal the pods for the sweet white pulp around the seed. 

Cacao Pod's Pulp Surrounded Seeds

FINICKY CACAO 

It gets diseases: pod rots, wilts, and fungus produced extraneous growth called witches' brooms. A botanical problem child for sure. A young tree can begin to bear fruit within its third or fourth year. At first it was thought that it needed the shade of taller trees to produce, but actually, cacao also needs the litter underneath found on rainforest floors of old leaves, dead animals, and rotten cacao pods to create a rich soil base. 

Cacao Grove 

The young pods, green in color can turn yellow, red, or green when ripe. They cannot open on their own and need humans or animals to do the deed. Animals were originally drawn to the sweet pulp surrounding the acidy bean, and would break the bean out of its pod-like shell for the meat.

It takes four steps to produce cacao 'nibs' or kernels so that the beans can be ground into chocolate: fermentation, drying, roasting or toasting, and winnowing. For three thousand years, this is how the production has gone. 

CACAO'S ROOTS

Though not one hundred percent certain, it's thought the species Theobroma cacao originated in the Amazon River Basin below the eastern slopes of the Andes. Researchers do not believe it was used by South Americans. It's thought that it could have been transported as an already domesticated fruit plant from South America to Central America and Mexico, with the discovery of the intricate chocolate process made by Mesoamericans. 

Map of Mexico Cacao Country (By eps.com)

COLUMBUS'S ENCOUNTER

It's well known that the first European encounter with cacao took place on Columbus' fourth Atlantic voyage when his son Ferdinand came across a Maya trading canoe with cacao beans in its cargo in 1502. 

Coe states it was known that chocolate was used among the Aztecs both as a drink and currency. And, he writes, Spanish invaders derived their earliest real knowledge of cacao, and the very word cacao, not from the Aztecs but from the Maya of the Yucatán and neighboring Central America. 

In fact, one thousand years before the Spaniards landed on their shores, the Maya were writing 'cacao' on magnificent pottery and vessels used in preparation of chocolate for their rulers and nobles, both living and dead. 

THE OLMEC CONNECTION

Calakmul Noble Gestures Towards Foaming Chocolate

But before the Maya, there were the Olmecs. Their complex culture flourished in Mexico's humid Gulf coast lowlands near Veracruz about 1500 to 400 BC. Prodigious builders of massive ceremonial centers, they left behind their famous collossal stone heads—multi-ton portraits of their kings—along with exquisite jade carvings. Sadly they left behind no writings that ethnographers were able to decode. They did have a script, and scattered hieroglyphs were left on inscribed serpentine blocks, but it is currently indecipherable. Linguists however did decipher a data point to an ancestral form of a family of languages, Mixe-Zoquean, still spoken by thousands of peasants near the lands covered by Olmec remains. It is thought that at the height of their influence over less advanced cultures, the highly civilized Olmecs used 'loan words' that are still in use to this day. 

And one of those loan words happens to be cacao, from the Mixe-Zoquean language and originally pronounced kakawa, linguists say. 

Colossal Stone Olmec Head Near Veracruz

So it might be said, Coe continues, that the Olmecs first domesticated the plant or at least discovered the chocolate process. Hershey Foods, U.S. purveyor of chocolate, got involved with discovering chocolate's history by scraping archeological ceramics used for liquids and detected alkaloids found in Theorbroma cacao as far back as 38 centuries, which pre-dates the Olmecs. 

16th Century Indigenous Woman Prepares Chocolate

Sedentary village culture in Mesoamerica, it was discovered, did not begin near the Gulf Coast lowlands but the Pacific coastal plain of Chiapas and adjacent Guatemala. Excavations show the first pottery producing culture of Mesoamerica, dubbed Barra, dedicated sophisticated neckless jars, so delicate they must have been used for the display of valued drinks rather than cooking, archeologist say. Radio-carbon dates were from 1800 to 400 BC, and the Barra were pre-Olmec. Some of the pieces found the compounds and/or alkaloids of cacao, proving positive for the tell-tale theobromine. 

Excavators for Hershey's lab found a stone bowl in San Lorenzo (Olmec) region dating to 1350 BC to be positive for theobromine, meaning that the Olmec kingdom knew of chocolate, had a Mixe-Zoquean word for it, and could well have been adapted from another emerging culture in Mesoamerica eventually passing that cacao knowledge on to the Maya. The Maya not only consumed the chocolate but revered it. Maya written history and art displays chocolate drinks being used in celebration and to finalize important transactions. Carvings on pots discovered in royal burial tombs show drawings of a drink being prepared, undoubtedly chocolate. 

A MAYA TRADITION

Despite chocolate's importance in Maya culture it wasn't reserved for the wealthy and powerful but was readily available to anyone. Pre-conquest, it was prepared in a number of ways: as drink, gruel, powder, possibly even as a solid substance like we know it today. In many Maya households, chocolate was served with every meal, it is believed. When used as a drink it was thick and frothy and often combined with chili peppers, honey, or water and the Maya liked to drink it hot. They also liked foam in their chocolate, not unlike a fine cappuccino, and would create it by pouring the liquid from one vessel to another like a Starbucks barista. They were as creative as modern chefs.

Ethno-historic accounts point to widespread use throughout Maya culture, in betrothal and marriage ceremonies, especially among the wealthy. In this way, chocolate drinks occupy the same niche as expensive French champagne in other cultures. In the Quiché kingdom, there were three lords whose function was to give wedding banquets. Quiché specialist Dennis Tedlock noted one of the things people did at these festivities was to 'chokola'j,' or drink chocolate together, a possible source of our English (and Spanish) word chocolate. 

A GIFT FROM THE GODS

The Aztecs took chocolate admiration to another level. They believed cacao was a gift from their gods. Like the Maya, they enjoyed the caffeinated kick of hot or cold and spiced chocolate beverages served in ornate containers, but they also used the beans as currency. In their culture, cacao beans were considered more valuable than gold. 

Cacao Beans As Currency

For Aztecs, it was an upper class extravagance though lower classes enjoyed it occasionally at weddings or celebrations. And Moctezuma II supposedly drank gallons of chocolate each day for energy and as an aphrodisiac. It's said he also reserved some beans for his military. 

CORTÉS AND CHOCOLATE

Cortés was introduced to chocolate by the Aztecs of Moctezuma's court. After returning to Spain, cacao beans in tow, he supposedly kept his chocolate knowledge a well-guarded secret. One story claims that the friars who presented Guatemalan Maya to Phillip II of Spain in 1544 also brought cacao beans along as a gift. No matter how chocolate got to Spain, by the late 1500s it was a much-loved indulgence by the court and Spain began importing chocolate in 1585. 

By 1639, a colonial source said of Mexico, "The business of this country is cacao." The Yucatec Maya had even learned how to grow cacao trees in the damp environment of cenotes, and the Spanish haciendados saw cacao pods dangling from sinkhole roofs in a form of 'silvi-culture.'

EUROPE GOES WILD FOR CHOCOLATE

Though it took a while for the European palate to embrace chocolate due to Spain keeping cacao a secret for so long, Europeans got a taste of it little by little while Phillip II was king. It was the highlight at his daughter's wedding to Louis XIII of France. Her gift to her husband was chocolate. Drinking hot chocolate became a fashionable trend in France before spreading throughout Europe. It's craze was nudged along by a pirate-botanist, William Hughes, who spent a good deal of time in the New World. A natural historian, he began to document plants and the foods he came across. In 1672 he wrote the first plant book on the New World titled The American Physician. In it he outlined a recipe for hot chocolate, adding ideas on what could be added to it, including rum or brandy.

William Hughes in the New World (By AtlasObscura)

Chocolate was ready for its close-up. And for the past 400 plus years, its popularity has skyrocketed. So we can thank the Olmecs, the Maya, the Aztecs, the traders and growers and marketers of chocolate for our long tasty love affair with a delectable and lovely treat.

If you enjoyed this post, check out Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy is on Amazon.

THE MAGNIFICENT MAYA CALENDAR SYSTEM AND HOW IT WORKS

Maya Calendar (historyonthenet.com)

"The deep time of the Maya calendar is stunning in its scale. . . It expressed the grandest expressions of time ever put down on stone or paper by human minds." David Stuart, archeologist and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient.  

THE CALENDARS

What if you thought of a calendar—or time—as a spiral, not a sheaf of papers that hang on a wall?

The Maya viewed time differently than we do today with the Gregorian calendar. The present was determined by the past. Everything repeated, everything was a recurring pattern. They only had to view the past to know what would happen in the future. Their intricate system of separate calendars was possibly used for predictions, say some archaeologists like Michael Coe, though others would disagree. It is widely thought that they borrowed the system from their Mesoamerican neighbors, the Olmec.

True Maya Calendar from Madrid Codex

Three calendars were a staple of every day Maya life. This triumvirate includes the Tzol'kin, or sacred round, which lasts 260 days; the Haab', which is a 360-day "solar"calendar to coordinate with the total number of days it takes the earth to rotate around the sun but with five 'days that had no name' at the end coming to 365; and the Long Count calendar, one of the most important cycles of Maya time, which lasts 5,125 years and which had been forecast to end on December 21, 2012.

COUNT OF DAYS

The 260-day Tzol'kin calendar is religious in its bearing. The count of days, as it is also known, was invented by pairing two smaller cycles—numbers one through thirteen—which equals the number of layers in Maya heaven, and the cycle of the twenty "day" names. The Tzol'kin is formed as a circle, not as a straight line.

"There is nothing quite like it, anywhere else in the world, " says archaeo-astronomer Anthony Aveni, author of The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012. "The sacred Tzol'kin is the centerpiece of the Maya calendar system; it is the single most important chunk of time the Maya ever kept, and still keep, in remote areas.

"But why 260?" pondered Aveni. "Multiply numbers thirteen and twenty? Also the Venus cycle's appearance as morning or evening star is 263 days."

Aveni believes that 260 days came about as some enlightened daykeeper, eons ago, realized this particular number signified so much.

FOCAL HARMONY

"It was a focal harmony point. It brought together so many of nature's phenomena: the moon, Venus, planting cycles. It may not have come about in a flash," he continues, "but with Maya knowledge that number and nature are joined together perfectly, the discovery of the multiple significance of 260 was bound to be raised to prominence in Maya time consciousness. One even took their name and their fortune from the day name in the 260-day count calendar."

COMMUNING WITH THE GODS

Maya God Images (mayangods.com)

The Tzol'kin could have been used for making predictions, for communicating with the gods. The Maya believed a god ruled each day, and depending on that god's traits, it could be good or bad for certain activities. This calendar was used in the way one's horoscope would be viewed today.

The calendar is easy to remember and that's why it has been passed down and is still in use. It fits into the culture of the people, said Barbara Tedlock, anthropologist and author of Time and the Highland Maya.

The Haab' calendar, which works with the Tzol'kin, has 18 named "months" of 20 calendar days each. The Maya then added five days at the end of this 360-day cycle. It was considered a nineteenth month and these five odd days were considered unlucky but essential to bring a total of 365 days for a full rotation cycle.

Caracol Observatory at Chichen Itzá

CALENDAR ROUND

These two calendars, like cogs in a wheel, meshed a named day in the Tzol'kin and also had a conjunct day in the Haab'. But this same "double" day could never reproduce again for 52 years, roughly the length of a human life. This was called the calendar round, and the only annual time count possessed by the people of Mexico. There were 260 possible different combinations of number and name in this creation. A Maya Calendar Round date is actually two dates listed as a pair, with a separate reference point.

Night Star Gazing at Chichen Itza (by Chichenitza.com)

In this combined calendar round, slippage occurred because a year is actually 365.24 days which as mathematicians and stargazers extraordinaire they had computed, but this did not bother the Maya. Nor did they try to play catch up like we do with leap years. They just let time roll along.

"That would mean Christmas could back up to early fall or the Fourth of July might back up into the cold of winter for us," said Anthony Aveni. "It wasn't of concern to the Maya," he continued, "because they placed more emphasis on following an unbroken chain of time."

52-YEAR CYCLE

This 52-year cycle combination was celebrated throughout Mesoamerica. The Aztecs included it in their fire ceremony that was timed by sky events. At midnight, when the calendar keepers saw the Pleiades had passed the zenith, they knew the movements of the heavens hadn't stopped, the world had not ended, and they would have another 52 years. 

Third in the triumvirate of Maya calendars is the Long Count and although widely used in Mesoamerica, the Maya took it to its highest degree during the classic period. The Long Count consisted of 13 baktuns. One baktun is 400 years. The starting point of the Long Count calendar, according to early archeologist Eric Thompson, was August 11, 3114 BC. It was known as 4 Ahaw.

13TH BAKTUN

This date may have been chosen because it coincided with the completion of a cycle of successful crops, an August summer's day. If you flash forward 5,125 years you come to the cycle's end, and this is where the December 21, 2012 debate came in. It also ended the thirteenth baktun cycle, an auspicious time for the Maya or 13.0.0.0.0. as carved on Maya stela.

Oldest Known Maya Mural, San Bartolo, Guatemala (by sciencenews.com)

Aveni goes on to explain the Maya used this innovation in their calendar so royalty could create a dynastic narrative that covered vast stretches of elapsed time. It extended Maya culture all the way back to the creation of the gods, cementing the reputation of daykeepers and royalty as gods themselves.

DAYKEEPERS

The daykeepers act as go-betweens. "They are empowered to make prayers to the gods and ancestors on behalf of the lay people," Barbara Tedlock said.

Maya Scribe

He or she pays attention to each and every day, making offerings of copal incense and lighting candles; they also do dream interpretations. Through dreams and reading the day's influence, recommendations were then made for the best course of action and both were used to plot one's future. Barbara Tedlock, anthologist along with her husband Dennis, author, translator and anthrologist, were initiated as daykeepers in a Guatemala highlands pueblo where they lived from 1975 to 1979, a very unusual occurrence for those not of Maya descent. 

It's hard for the modern world to fathom why such a complex calendar system existed. Michael Coe, archeologist and author of The Maya (Editions one through eight), stated his belief of the why's and wherefores like this: "How such a period of time even came into being is an enigma, but the use to which it was put is clear: Every single day had its own omens and associations and the march of the twenty days acted like a fortune-telling machine guiding the destinies of all the Maya and the peoples of Mexico who used this calendar. It still survives in unchanged form among some indigenous peoples of southern Mexico and the Maya highlands, under the guard of the calendar priests."

Maya Stela of Ruler

With this calendar fashioned as a direct line to the cosmos, royalty and priests were able to govern and control the masses by predicting common events. Most likely with the aid of their calendars and the predictions derived from them, the Maya enjoyed 1500 years of relative stability. It was not until ninth century AD, the finale of the classic period of the Maya, that the Long Count was abandoned and not seen again on Maya stela. Times were changing. One wonders if the stars and calendars predicted that. And I would guess that yes, they did.

If you enjoyed this post, check out my other works, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya. It's available on Amazon with tales of expat life and living within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites. Also, check out my website at www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are available on Amazon where you can find my overview of the 2012 Maya calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed—Demystifying the Prophecy.*

*Excerpts of Chapter 6 from my book Maya 2012 Revealed—Demystifying the Prophecy were used in the post.