Ancient Pottery Reveals the Earliest Known Traces of Chocolate East of the Mississippi, Painting a Picture of Connection in the Americas

The pleasure of chocolate carried across the continent may have fueled the builders of earthen monuments in Georgia a millennium ago. A new genetic analysis of residues left behind on pieces of pottery near the Etowah Indian Mounds has revealed the earliest known traces of cacao east of the Mississippi River, expanding archaeologists’ understanding of the spread of goods and ideas in the ancient Americas. Cacao, which produces beans that are fermented and roasted to create chocolate, originated in Mesoamerica.

Some of the earliest evidence for the plant’s domestication dates to about 5,300 years ago in Ecuador. By 1500 B.C.E., the Olmecs of southern Mexico were making fermented chocolate drinks. Cacao beans were even used as a currency by the Maya in the Classic Period, and in 1050 C.E., chocolate was widespread in the region.

But only limited evidence from the time had identified the substance in North America. The new discovery, published on August 26 in PLOS One, reveals that the magic beans had somehow reached Etowah by around the 11th century. Today, sitting just northwest of Atlanta, Etowah hosts six earthen monuments created by Native Americans during the pre-Columbian Mississippian period.

The tallest of them once rose about 64 feet high, King says, and was built with red clay between 1000 and 1550 C.E. Pyramid-like mounds were also sculpted by the people of Cahokia in southern Illinois, who created the famous, 100-foot-tall Monks Mound. King says that at Etowah, the building of these structures was likely highly ritualized—the mounds themselves may have symbolized our planet.

By building or adding to the structure, the Mississippians were symbolically placing themselves within the cosmos. It wasn’t all heavy lifting, though. The Mississippians likely celebrated the completion of a mound with a large feast.

In the 1950s, archaeologists found the remains of such a feast marking one of the earliest phases of mound building at Etowah, sometime between 1050 and 1150 C.E. The remnants, which included animal bones and pottery fragments, were discovered in a borrow pit—a hole generated by the mining of red clay for the mounds. After the Mississippians mined clay from these pits, they filled them back up with other dirt and trash—in this case, the remains of the feast.