AMERICA'S FIRST CONNOISSEURS OF CHOCOLATE

The global chocolate market is structured around the sale of cacao seeds for the production of solid chocolate. In Mesoamerica, where the custom of drinking chocolate enjoys an antiquity that can be traced back to the first millennium B.C., chocolate is consumed both as a beverage and as solid bricks. Archaeological evidence from a cacao-growing area in the Maya Lowlands-the Sibun Valley-suggests that during the first millennium A.D., cacao producers became entangled in the political schemes of powerful rulers with an appetite for chocolate. Epigraphic and ethno-historical sources indicate that substantial amounts of human energy were expended in the cultivation and transport of sacks of cacao beans. Female-gendered labor employed in the preparation and serving of the chocolate drink appears to be a tradition with deep antiquity regardless of whether the preparation took place in a modest home or as part of a royal banquet. Connoisseurship associated with chocolate drinking at Classic Maya royal courts is made particularly explicit by virtue of iconographic and hieroglyphic sources. These early connoisseurs of chocolate provide an illustration of the deep antiquity of our appetite for cacao and also of the profoundly entangled linkages between food and power.