Archeologists dream to find a piece of history – and that's exactly what UT researchers have done. They recently discovered some new information about a common modern addiction: chocolate.
When UT archeologists return from a dig in Central America, their work normally consists of cleaning and piecing together fragments of artifacts from the Maya society. It’s no easy task; the boxes contain hundreds of thousands of broken pots.
But recent testing proved UT researchers found more than pieces of pottery. They found a piece of history in one vessel – chocolate used as early as 2,600 years ago.
"The earliest documented chocolate used that is in a Maya vessel was somewhere between AD 400 and 500,” explained Fred Valdez, a UT associate professor of anthropology. “This finding pushes that back at least a thousand years, probably back to 400 BC – maybe a little bit earlier."
 |  |
 | |  |
| | | | | | | |
Mayan chocolate
UT researchers found chocolate was used 1,000 years earlier than previously thought.
 
| | |
| | | | | |
|
Working with Hershey chemists, UT archeologists scraped chocolate residue from the inside of the pot.
"There's at least 14 of these spouted vessels or chocolate pots that we have, several of them containing remnants of chocolate. So we can't say that they're all used for chocolate, but that's certainly a function of them," Valdez said.
Even though, these ancient vessels have been called "chocolate pots" for the last hundred years, archeologists say there was never documented proof explaining why.
Another mystery still unanswered is how the chocolate was used. Each vessel was found buried with a person near Colha, Belize. Researchers say the Maya may have believed chocolate was nourishment to help them in their next lives.
"The potential for future research is just tremendous,” Valdez said. “The impact on society may also be tremendous. Who knows somebody 10, 15, 20 years from now may be able to find other kinds of residues and compounds that have tremendous medicinal value."
Researchers found the chocolate residue at the end of a 20-year long project. And in another rare finding for these archeologists, some of the pots were found in tact.
UT researchers say the chocolate residue was almost discovered by accident because normally, each pot would have been cleaned. But in this case, some pots were held back because of a unique paint on the outside of the pottery. Later, researchers learned those pots were the ones with the chocolate.
