Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao (review)

As a geographer who has done research on another agricultural commodity of great importance to Latin America – bananas – I read Chocolate in Mesoamerica with great interest. The book is an edited volume with 28 authors; many of the chapters are co-authored. It offers a multi-disciplinary look at one of the region's most significant exports, though that aspect of cacao and chocolate is not the focus of the volume. Instead, it provides the reader with a predominantly historical perspective on the cultivation of cacao, its multiple uses, and its cultural ramifications in Mesoamerica.

The book is logically organized. The twenty chapters that follow the introduction are divided into four parts, the first of which includes four chapters that provide a multi-dimensional background about the cacao plant, its origins, its physical aspects including its chemistry, the processes of its domestication, and its basic archaeological importance.

The parts that follow are arranged chronologically into pre-Columbian, colonial, and post-colonial groupings. Given the preponderance of anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians among the 28 authors, it is not surprising that the pre-Columbian section is the strongest of the three chronological parts. In fact, many of the chapters in the two subsequent sections also focus on pre-Columbian matters in their early pages. Many fewer pages are devoted to colonial and modern aspects of cacao in Mesoamerican societies.

Geographers among the book's readers can gain insights into the methodologies employed by other disciplines, including several outside of the social sciences. Linguistics is among these; such tools as syllable reduction, stress placement, and glottochronology, along with linguistic methods of tracing word origins and their diffusion, are all employed in an effort to resolve the issue of cacao's initial domestication and its incorporation into Mesoamerican cultures. The evolutionary origins of cacao are examined through haplotype analysis from the genetic sciences to determine the migratory path of the plant itself in an effort to ascertain if it evolved separately in South America (western Amazonia) and Mesoamerica or if its origins lie solely in South America. Biology and chemistry also figure prominently, particularly in the book's early chapters where cacao's exceedingly complex chemistry is discussed for the purpose of ascertaining which of its properties were appealing to the early South Americans and Mesoamericans prompting its domestication. Its chemistry is also of importance in modern archaeology, as chemical analysis of early pottery and other human quotidian containers can confirm the presence of cacao or chocolate and give clues as to the utility it had for the societies involved. Several of the chapters are quite inter-disciplinary in this manner, further enriching the multidisciplinary nature of the volume. Overall, the book provides good ammunition for those who advocate multidisciplinary approaches to the study of places and cultures.

Chocolate in Mesoamerica is very well-researched as evidenced by a bibliography that is sixty-four pages long. It makes excellent use of many sources from the early colonial period, many of whose Spanish writers provided the best accounts available of pre-Columbian societies in the region. Girolamo Benzoni, Fray Bartólome de las Casas, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdes, Fray Tomás de la Torre, and several colonial audiencia documents for western El Salvador are among the sources cited. This is supplemented by a vast array of reports from archeological expeditions (both early and contemporary), ample field work, and countless interviews, mostly with indigenous peoples and other representing rural folk cultures. In addition, the volume is lavishly illustrated with photos and drawings, most of them devoted to artifacts related to the many uses of cacao and chocolate by Mesoamerica's peoples.

An exhaustive review of the questions and issues addressed would require greater space than will be allocated to this review. A small sample includes the debate over the origins of cacao, the...