Lengthy earlier than Europeans arrived, cacao (Theobroma cacao) might have traveled far past its Central and South American homeland to succeed in Etowah, a serious Mississippian-period metropolis in what’s now Georgia.
An artist’s conception of Etowah, a Mississippian tradition web site positioned on the banks of the Etowah River in Bartow County, Georgia. Picture credit score: Herb Roe / Sci.Information.
“For many years archaeologists, historians, and epigraphers have recognized that there’s a lengthy historical past of cacao consumption in Central America beginning lengthy earlier than European contact,” mentioned College of South Carolina archaeologist Adam King and his colleagues.
“Extra lately it was evidenced that cacao consumption began at the least 5,000 years in the past in South America.”
“Clear proof that Indigenous folks north of modern-day Mexico additionally consumed cacao earlier than the approaching of Europeans has been rather more troublesome to seek out.”
“Cacao is a plant that developed and is tailored solely to tropical climates, so its presence in precontact contexts within the modern-day US should have come from contact with folks in or close to cacao-producing areas like Central and South America,” they added.
“Utilizing chemical residues absorbed into historic pottery containers, researchers argued that Indigenous folks dwelling in Pueblo Bonito on the Ancestral Pueblo web site of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico additionally consumed cacao-based drinks.”
“They based mostly this on the presence of what has been thought-about the important thing diagnostic compound of cacao, theobromine.”
“Their argument was bolstered by extra traces of fabric proof of sustained connections between the inhabitants of Chaco Canyon and other people in tropical areas of modern-day Mexico.”
A cacao tree (Theobroma cacao) with fruit pods in varied levels of ripening. Picture credit score: Marco Vasquez.
In a brand new research, the researchers analyzed pottery sherds from the Etowah web site, a serious Mississippian-period metropolis close to Cartersville, Georgia.
They recovered fragmented historic DNA from Theobroma cacao embedded within the ceramic residue.
The sherds date to the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE, greater than a century earlier than Etowah reached its peak as one of many period’s most vital facilities.
The findings construct on earlier chemical residue testing that had detected compounds related to cacao in the identical pottery, however these outcomes have been ambiguous: the identical chemical markers additionally seem in yaupon holly, a caffeinated plant native to the area and used to brew a ceremonial beverage referred to as black drink.
By sequencing genetic materials slightly than counting on chemical traces alone, the scientists have been capable of affirm the DNA’s particular match to cacao slightly than the native different.
The pottery was recovered from giant pits that when served as fill for Etowah’s earliest earthen mound, contexts related to communal feasting.
The invention signifies cacao consumption performed a job within the practices that helped unite the neighborhood throughout the metropolis’s adolescence.
It additionally provides to a small however rising physique of proof that commerce networks distributing cacao prolonged into the present-day United States effectively earlier than European contact.
“This discovery at Etowah asks us to broaden our understanding of the networks that distributed cacao all through the Americas earlier than European colonization,” the authors concluded.
The findings seem on-line within the journal PLoS ONE.
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A. King et al. 2026. Cacao within the Mississippian World: Archaeogenomic proof for T. cacao consumption on the Etowah Website, Georgia. PLoS One 21 (8): e0353607; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0353607