The history of chocolate will have to be revised following a new discovery, along with the history of humanity’s troubled relationship with alcohol. Archaeologists working in Honduras detected residues from cacao plants in liquid holding vessels from 500 years earlier than beverages of the chocolate precursor have previously been found. John Henderson and colleagues think the beverages in question were more like beer than a hot chocolate-type drink and could have been as potent at 5% alcohol by volume (BBC, LA Times, Telegraph, NY Times, Times).

In this week’s PNAS, they report detecting theobromine in vessels dating from about 1150 BC, half a century earlier than previous finds. Theobromine occurs only in cacao. Beverages drunk at the Puerto Escondido site in Honduras were probably produced by fermenting the sweet pulp that surrounds cacao seeds. “Fermentation is also an early step in the process used to produce the better-known nonalcoholic chocolate beverage in Mesoamerica. We argue that this is a secondary use of a by-product, fermented cacao seeds, and that an alcoholic beverage made from the pulp was originally the primary consumable,” the paper states.

Co-author Patrick McGovern, of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, was amazed by how many of the samples he tested were positive for theobromine. “The results were astounding. Every vessel that he [Henderson] had chosen and was tested gave a positive signal for theobromine," he said (LA Times).

UPDATE – 14/11/07

I may have slightly misled you. This is a new comment by Patrick McGovern:

It should be noted that the use of “beer” in many of the media articles is confusing. The confusion has arisen because “chichi” has two usages:

(1) a beverage made from maize (corn), a cereal like barley or wheat which goes through the usual beer-making process of saccharification (conversion of the starches to sugar) and the addition of yeast to start the fermentation; and (2) a broader usage to mean any “fermented beverage” in the Americas, often with additives (honey, chillis, flowers, hallucinogenic substances, etc.) to a corn “beer.” The earlier cacao beverage made only from the sweet fruit pulp is technically a “wine,” such as those made from grapes, apples and other fruits.

John Henderson has also posted an additional comment:

Space is always tight, but some of the pieces are so concise that they do not mention the names of my collaborators. Their contributions to the research are at least as important as mine.

Rosemary A. Joyce, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley, is co-director of the archaeological project in the lower Ulúa Valley in Honduras. We designed and carried out the archaeological fieldwork and analysis together. Patrick E. McGovern and Gretchen R. Hall, at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, together with W. Jeffrey Hurst, at the Hershey Foods Technical Center did the chemical analyses that identified traces of theobromine in the pottery.

Image: Bodega Brown bottle from northern Honduras / Image courtesy of PNAS/National Academy of Sciences