Chocolate Everywhere!

Display Case at Chaco Museum Showing Cylinder Jar and Canteens

I mentioned earlier that there was a new paper out on chocolate at Chaco that I needed to read.  I read it today, and it’s quite interesting.  One of the most interesting things about it is that it’s by a different group of researchers than the first one and uses somewhat different methods.  As far as I can tell, all the study of chocolate residue in archaeological pottery until this paper has been done by Jeffrey Hurst at Hershey, in collaboration with a variety of archaeologists.  Except for the Chaco paper he did with Patricia Crown, all of Hurst’s work in this area has been on Mesoamerican pottery and in collaboration with Mesoamerican archaeologists.  This makes sense, since Mesoamerica is where chocolate is grown and was used most extensively in antiquity.  Hurst’s methods involve scraping residue from the interior of pots or grinding up potsherds to test them for the presence of theobromine, a chemical compound that serves as a biomarker for chocolate.  They aren’t hugely destructive methods, as analytical methods applied to artifacts go, but there is a certain amount of damage inherent in the scraping (and more in the grinding, of course).

This new paper pioneers a different method, which uses a wash of deionized water on whole vessel interiors (this could presumably be done with sherds too, but these authors used whole vessels) and subsequent analysis of the water with a very sensitive mass spectrometer.  The researchers are not affiliated with Hershey, but instead with Bristol-Myers Squibb, except for the lead author, Dorothy Washburn.  Washburn has for many years now been studying symmetry patterns on pottery and other artifacts and she has come up with a variety of interpretations of social structure and change from the patterns she sees.  The work she has done on Chaco has led her to posit that the “special” vessel forms associated with the Chaco Phenomenon, particularly cylinder jars but also pitchers and shallow bowls, show a very different type of symmetry from that prevailing on Pueblo pottery before and after Chaco.  In publications such as her chapter in the Salmon Ruins synthesis volume, she further contends that this sudden difference indicates an influx of people from elsewhere with a very different social structure, and she points to Mexico as the most likely source given the presence of both similar symmetries and similar vessel forms there.  This puts her in what I’ve called the “hard Mexicanist” camp, not a popular position among Chacoan scholars these days (although this chocolate stuff may start to change that).  I don’t really buy her arguments for physical migration of Mesoamericans to Chaco, and I think she generally goes a bit too far in inferring specific social structures from the abstract symmetries she studies, but her evidence for a big difference between Chacoan and other designs is solid and well-taken.

Cylinder Jar at Chaco Museum from Above

Given Washburn’s theories, it makes sense that she would jump at the chance to look for chocolate residue in Chacoan vessels.  The Crown and Hurst paper that started all this really came out of nowhere; no one in the Southwest was expecting it at all, and it’s likely to end up being one of the major turning points in interpretations of Chaco.  The paper itself, though, was short, and the research behind it was modest in scale.  Crown and Hurst only tested five sherds from the mounds in front of Pueblo Bonito, three of which seemed from their curvature to be from cylinder jars while one of the others was from a pitcher and the final one could have been from either a cylinder jar or a pitcher.  Testing revealed that the three definite cylinder jar sherds showed evidence of chocolate, while the other two didn’t.  This was remarkable, groundbreaking stuff, to be sure, but it was still only five sherds.  The really important thing about that paper was that it opened up the possibility of running tests like this on all sorts of sherds and vessels to determine the extent of chocolate use in the prehistoric Southwest, and it seems Washburn was inspired to take it a step further.

Room 28 at Pueblo Bonito

She and her coauthors, William Washburn, who I presume is her husband, and Petia Shipkova, both of whom work for Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Pharmaceutical Research Institute in Princeton, NJ, apparently developed this new technique for doing the theobromine testing and they applied it not to sherds but to whole vessels.  Not just any whole vessels, either; they went straight for the important ones: the cylinder jars from Room 28 at Pueblo Bonito, along with cylinder jars, pitchers, and shallow bowls from burial rooms elsewhere in Bonito (including Room 33).  They also tested three cylinder jars from Pueblo del Arroyo, at least two of which are of plain redware rather than the whiteware that characterizes all other known cylinder jars (there is some confusion over whether the other jar is red or white, in that the paper says all three are red but the National Museum of Natural History catalog seems to say that one is white).  In addition, they tested a variety of similar forms from the Hohokam site of Los Muertos.  This is interesting, because the Hohokam in southern Arizona showed a wide variety of Mesoamerican influences to a much greater degree than Chaco ever did, and one of the first things I wondered when I read the Crown and Hurst paper was whether a similar study of Hohokam vessels would also show chocolate use.  They picked Los Muertos specifically because it’s a Classic-period platform-mound complex with what appear to be elite burials.  The platform mounds of the Hohokam Classic are the only other phenomenon except for Chaco in the prehistoric Southwest that show clear evidence of social hierarchy, and the authors of this paper clearly chose this set of vessels to see if chocolate use corresponded to increased hierarchy.  In all they tested 57 vessels from Chaco great houses and 10 from Los Muertos, and as a control they also tested eight vessels from small sites at Chaco, on the Little Colorado River in Arizona, and in southwestern Colorado.

Pitchers at Chaco Museum

What they found was that most of the great-house and Hohokam vessels did indeed test positive for theobromine.  Specifically, 80% of the Los Muertos vessels tested positive, as did 65% of the Chaco cylinder jars, 41% of the Chaco pitchers, and 83% of the shallow bowls from Chaco.  The lower percentage for the pitchers may indicate that they were used for a variety of things, not just chocolate, which might in turn explain why Crown and Hurst’s pitcher sherd tested negative.  The very high number of positives for the shallow bowls is very interesting, and suggests that this class of vessels, largely overlooked because they resemble local forms more than the cylinder jars, may be more important than people have thought.  On the other hand, only 12 bowls were tested (versus 23 cylinder jars and 22 pitchers), so this could just be a fluke of sampling size.  These results seem to confirm the Crown and Hurst results and reinforce the idea that the presence of chocolate, a clear sign of ongoing trade and contact with Mesoamerica as well as acceptance of Mesoamerican ideas and practices, may correlate strongly with the evidence for social hierarchy at both Chaco and the Classic Hohokam platform mounds.

But wait, what about the small-house sites?  Here’s where things get really interesting, in an unexpected way.  All eight vessels from the small houses tested positive for theobromine.  This was totally unexpected, and the authors devote quite a bit of discussion to this result.  Apparently concerned that there might be a problem with the whole theobromine-testing enterprise, they went looking for native plants in the Southwest that might contain theobromine.  If there were any, of course, that would call all of these results into question.  They couldn’t find any, so it does seem (unless there’s something amiss with their experimental protocols) that the results for the small houses really do indicate that chocolate was not just confined to the great houses at Chaco and the platform mounds in Phoenix.  They suggest that commoners might have been paid in chocolate for their work for the great-house elites, a very interesting idea.  In Mesoamerica cacao beans were often used as currency, and if something similar was going on at Chaco that would be cause for some serious rethinking of how the Chacoan economy worked.

Bc 51

One issue that the authors don’t really address is that the small houses they picked are all within areas that could plausibly have been part of the Chaco system, so there isn’t really an independent check here on how widespread chocolate was in the region as a whole.  They preferentially selected vessels from early excavations because early excavators usually didn’t wash the vessels they found, which makes sense for this type of project but also means that provenience information for the small sites is not ideal.  Nevertheless, one of the small houses that produced these vessels was Bc 51 at Chaco, which is right across the canyon from Pueblo Bonito and would obviously have been closely incorporated into the Chaco system.  The others included a cluster of sites in the Montezuma Valley of southwestern Colorado, which is an area with several nearby Chacoan outliers, and a site on the Little Colorado River in eastern Arizona that is not located very precisely but could have been relatively close to the far western edge of the Chacoan system.  There are several major outliers along the Rio Puerco of the West, a major tributary of the Little Colorado, and some evidence for at least a small amount of Chacoan influence as far west as Winslow.

Further testing of vessels and sherds from a wide variety of sites and time periods should help to clarify this picture.  The great thing about this chocolate stuff is that it’s all about analyzing pottery, which is by far the most common type of artifact found at sites in the Southwest.  There are vast numbers of vessels in museums throughout the country that could easily be tested using these techniques, and even vaster numbers of sherds collected from sites throughout the region that could potentially produce an unbelievably huge and detailed database of information on the distribution of chocolate in the prehistoric Southwest.  There are a lot of questions still outstanding at this point, but there is also a huge opportunity to try to answer them.  Hopefully this question will keep a lot of archaeology grad students set for thesis and dissertation topics for years to come, and the rest of us will benefit from the information they find and the patterns they discover.

Washburn, D., Washburn, W., & Shipkova, P. (2011). The prehistoric drug trade: widespread consumption of cacao in Ancestral Pueblo and Hohokam communities in the American Southwest Journal of Archaeological Science, 38 (7), 1634-1640 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2011.02.029

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