chocolate

Chocolate may have been on the menu at great communal feasts in North America centuries earlier than anyone imagined. A new study published in the journal PLOS One has identified ancient DNA from Theobroma cacao – the plant behind chocolate – absorbed into pottery from the Etowah site in Georgia. This offers the first firm evidence that cacao consumption was part of the Mississippian world nearly 1,000 years ago. The find indicates that this ancient cacao was far from its original growing area and it coincides with the archaeological record of the large city, Etowah, being contemporaneous with Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, where all of the Pueblo ancestors drank a chocolate beverage during the time period spanning the two