History of Cacao: Part 5 — From the Rainforest to Chaco Canyon
Updated: Oct 22
In Chaco Canyon, sandstone walls rise from a dry landscape of cliffs, open sky, and sparse vegetation. Nearly a thousand years ago, vessels inside this desert world held an ingredient grown far to the south: cacao.
The tree could not grow here. Its presence survives in the pottery.
A Great House In The Canyon
Pueblo Bonito was one of the great houses of the Ancestral Pueblo world. Its builders arranged hundreds of rooms around plazas and circular kivas, creating a monumental complex with a distinctive D-shaped plan. At its height, parts of the building rose four to five stories. [1]
Chaco’s great houses were connected to a wider regional landscape by roads. Pueblo Bonito served many purposes, including storage, hospitality, trade, and ceremonial gatherings. Its rooms and plazas formed part of a network extending beyond the canyon walls. [1]
Among its pottery were unusually tall, straight-sided cylinder jars. Many carried black geometric designs on a light surface. Their form differed from the rounded cooking and storage vessels familiar elsewhere in the Southwest. [2]
Three Fragments And A Tropical Ingredient
In 2009, archaeologist Patricia Crown and chemist W. Jeffrey Hurst published the results of tests on fragments representing five vessels from Pueblo Bonito. The pottery dated to approximately 1000–1125 CE. [3]
The three samples identified as probable cylinder jars contained theobromine, a chemical marker used to identify cacao in this context. The other two samples did not. Tiny compounds absorbed into fired clay had preserved evidence of an ingredient that had disappeared from view. [3]
Cacao requires warm, humid growing conditions. Chaco’s arid climate ruled out local cultivation, so the ingredient had reached Pueblo Bonito through exchange with communities connected to Mesoamerica. [3]
Crown and Hurst proposed that knowledge of preparing and serving cacao beverages traveled with the seeds. The cylinder jars offered a possible connection between the ingredient and the occasions on which people gathered to drink it. [3]
Connections Across Distance
Cacao joined other materials and living creatures that had reached Chaco from distant regions. Copper bells and scarlet macaws had already been recovered at Pueblo Bonito. The cacao findings added a food ingredient to this record of exchange. [4]
An object could pass through several communities on its journey. The chemical traces establish cacao’s arrival in the canyon; the particular route remains unrecorded.
The Story Reaches Farther Back
Research published in 2013 extended the investigation to Alkali Ridge Site 13 in southeastern Utah. Dorothy Washburn, William Washburn, and Petia Shipkova reported cacao traces in pottery associated with an eighth-century settlement, centuries before the Pueblo Bonito vessels. [5]
The Alkali Ridge findings brought an earlier period and a different community into the discussion. Cacao’s northern history was becoming a story of several places and generations, rather than a single discovery in one great house. [5]
A History Held In Clay
The painted cylinder jars brought Chaco’s cacao story into focus. Across the distance between tropical cultivation and desert settlements, an ingredient had traveled into another landscape and another social world.
Next, the series returns to Mesoamerican markets, where cacao beans also served as a means of payment.
Sources
Cover inspired by photographs of Pueblo Bonito masonry and cylinder-jar forms presented by the National Park Service; vessel reference credited there to the American Museum of Natural History. Original painted composition.
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