With National Science Foundation support a team from UC Berkeley will conduct research on the cacao plant, the natural source of chocolate, in its original area of cultivation in Central America. The project will develop a means to identify evidence for this important crop in archaeological sites, allowing researchers to tell whether different sites were centers of production prior to the Spanish conquest. Under the direction of Professors Rosemary Joyce and Christine Hastorf, postdoctoral researcher Dr. Kirsten Tripplett will conduct a baseline survey seeking examples of cacao plants in areas of Mexico, Belize, and Honduras that were recorded as important chocolate producing regions in the sixteenth century AD. Samples of cacao plants representing native populations of the species will be collected for further research in the United States. In a specialized laboratory for the study of ancient plant remains operated by Professor Hastorf, Dr. Tripplett will explore the possibility of identifying pollen, starch, and other cacao plant parts in archaeological sites. She will create a reference database for the identification of ancient cacao plant remains, that will be made accessible by computer. Dr. Tripplett will test the reference collection by comparing it to plant remains recovered from archaeological sites where cacao production is suspected to have been important. Because cacao was used as a form of money in the region in the sixteenth century, identifying it in archaeological sites will be a critical step in understanding the economy of the Aztecs, Mayas, and earlier Mesoamerican societies. Archaeologists have proposed that production or trade of cacao was a factor in many different sites, but until now, no systematic model has allowed identification of remains of the plant. This project will establish procedures for recovering and identifying evidence of this critically important plant.
