Historical Archeology in the Chocolate Bar

What can a potsherd tell us about a chocolate bar? Three leading archaeologists that have focused part of their work in cacao—Patricia L. Crown, PhD, whose discovery of cacao residues in Chaco Canyon pottery rewrote the story of chocolate in North America; Cameron McNeil, PhD, an archaeobotanist whose work traces cacao through ancient Mesoamerica; and Kathryn Sampeck, PhD, a historical archaeologist of chocolate and colonialism—join our hosts to excavate the deep past hiding in every chocolate bar, from ritual drinking vessels to colonial marketplaces.Canonical books in cacao — dig deeper with our guests' essential works:Patricia L. Crown (ed.), The House of the Cylinder Jars: Room 28 in Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon (University of New Mexico Press, 2020) -- documenting the re-excavation of the room that held Chaco's famed cylinder jars, in which Crown and Jeffrey Hurst identified the first evidence of chocolate north of the US–Mexico border (https://muse.jhu.edu/book/78107) Cameron L. McNeil (ed.), Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao (University Press of Florida, 2006) -- bringing together archaeologists, historians, art historians, linguists, botanists, and anthropologists to explore the domestication, preparation, and significance of cacao in ancient and modern communities of the Americas (https://floridapress.org/9780813033822/chocolate-in-mesoamerica/ Project MUSE) Stacey Schwartzkopf & Kathryn E. Sampeck (eds.), Substance and Seduction: Ingested Commodities in Early Modern Mesoamerica (University of Texas Press, 2017) -- tracing how chocolate, sugar, alcohol, tobacco, and other seductive substances became a nexus of desire for pleasure and profit in Mesoamerica since colonial times (https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477313879/)