Long before the Europeans arrived, Cacao (Theobroma cacao) May have reached far beyond its homeland in Central and South America Etowaha major Mississippian city located in present-day Georgia.
An artist’s vision of Etowah, a Mississippi cultural heritage site located on the banks of the Etowah River in Bartow County, Georgia. Image credit: Herb Roe / Sci.News.
“Archaeologists, historians, and epigraph writers have known for decades that Central America had a long history of cocoa consumption, long before European contact,” said Adam King, an archaeologist at the University of South Carolina, and his colleagues.
“More recently, it has been proven that cacao consumption began in South America at least 5,000 years ago.”
“It’s much harder to find clear evidence that indigenous peoples north of present-day Mexico also consumed cacao before the arrival of Europeans.”
“Because cacao is a plant that evolved and adapted only to tropical climates, its presence in pre-contact settings in the modern United States must have resulted from contact with people in or near cacao-producing regions such as Central and South America,” the researchers added.
“Researchers used chemical residues absorbed in ancient pottery vessels to argue that indigenous people living at Pueblo Bonito, an ancestral pueblo site in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, also drank cacao-based drinks.”
“They based this on the presence of theobromine, an important diagnostic compound in cocoa.”
“Their arguments were strengthened by additional physical evidence showing a continuing connection between the Chaco Canyon inhabitants and the peoples of the tropics of modern Mexico.”
cacao tree (Theobroma cacao) containing fruit pods at various stages of ripening. Image credit: Marco Vazquez.
In a new study, researchers analyzed pottery shards from the ruins of Etowah, a major Mississippian-era city near Cartersville, Georgia.
They discovered fragmented ancient DNA. Theobroma cacao Embedded in ceramic residue.
The fragments date from the 11th to 12th centuries A.D., more than a century before Etowah reached its peak as one of the most important centers of its time.
The finding builds on previous chemical residue tests that detected cocoa-related compounds in the same pottery, but those results were equivocal. The same chemical marker also appears in yaupon holly, a caffeine-containing plant native to the area and used to brew a ceremonial drink known as black drink.
By sequencing the genetic material, rather than relying solely on chemical signatures, scientists were able to confirm that the DNA specifically matched cocoa rather than a natural substitute.
This pottery was recovered from a large pit once used as a fill for Etowah’s oldest earthen mound, a context associated with communal feasting.
This finding indicates that cocoa consumption played a role in practices that brought communities together during the city’s formative years.
It also adds to a small but growing body of evidence that trade networks distributing cocoa extended into what is now the United States well before contact with Europe.
“This discovery at Etowah challenges us to expand our understanding of the networks that distributed cocoa across the Americas before European colonization,” the authors concluded.
of findings Published in an online magazine PLoS ONE.
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A. King others. 2026. Cocoa of the Mississippian World: Evidence from Archaeogenomics. T. Cacao Consumption in Etowah site, Georgia. PLoS One 21 (8): e0353607;doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0353607
Source: www.sci.news
