The aroma of chocolate may be velvety and rich, but that doesn’t mean it was reserved for the elites in ancient Mesoamerica. New chemical analysis reveals that despite what many archaeologists have assumed, less affluent Maya families had access to cacao as well.
“The suggestion that the use of cacao is restricted to or used exclusively by the elite must be set aside,” write the authors in a study published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Lead author Anabel Ford, an archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has studied the Maya for decades. In 1983, she first mapped the Late Classic period site of El Pilar in Belize near the Guatemalan border. She has been working at the site ever since, often with a focus on the everyday domestic life based on remains found in the smaller houses surrounding the central temples at ...
