Aztec statuary
of a male figure holding a cacao pod

Wikipedia

Scientists believe the first cacao beverages were sipped from vessels like this one, which was found in northern Honduras.

New analyses of similar pottery fragments suggest people have been enjoying chocolate for more than 3,000 years—about 500 years earlier than previously believed

to top of page / A-Z index

to top of page / A-Z index

• About Chocolate -- Cadbury.co.uk
  
  
• A Brief History of Chocolate, Food of the Gods -- Athena Review Vol.2, no.2
  
  
• Ancient Chocolate Found in Maya "Teapot" (July 17, 2002)
  
  
• Cadbury.co.uk
  • About Chocolate
  • History Of Chocolate
    
    
• film: Chocolat (122 min., 2000, DVD 1074, VC 2224 [1990])
  
  
• "Chocolate and Holidays—A Long History" -- National Geographic News (3/29/02)
  
  
• chocolate.org
  • Psychoactive food: chocolate
  • Theobroma cacao
    
    
• Chocolate recipes -- BBC Food
  
  
• Chocolate Review
  
  
• Divine Chocolate -- "the Fairtrade Chocolate Company co-owned by the cocoa farmers cooperative Kuapa Kokoo in Ghana"
  
  
• Cocoa: Tree, Pod, Bean and Powder -- JustFoodNow (19 January 2011)
  
  
• Dreiss, Meredith L. and Sharon Edgar Greenhill. Chocolate: Pathway to the Gods. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2008.
  
  
• "The EU Chocolate Wars": A run-up to Scaling
  • slides
    
    
• Eurochocolate -- Perugia, Italy
  • Etruscan Chocohotel
    
    
• Grivetti, Louis E., and Howard-Yana Shapiro, Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage. Wiley, 2009.
  
  
• History of Chocolate -- Cadbury.co.uk
  
  
• History of Chocolate -- Chicago Field Museum
  
  
• International Cocoa Organization
  
  
• film: Like Water for Chocolate (105 min., 1993)
  
  
• McNeil, Cameron (Ed.). Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao. Gainesville, FL:University Press of Florida, 2009.
  
  
• Powis, Terry G., W. Jeffrey Hurst, María del Carmen Rodríguez, Ponciano Ortíz C., Michael Blake, David Cheetham, Michael D. Coe & John G. Hodgson (December 2007). "Oldest chocolate in the New World". Antiquity 81 (314).
  
  
• The True History of Chocolate, Second Edition, Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007 [1996].
  
  
• The True History of Chocolate, a lecture by Michael D. Coe, Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, Yale University, presented at the Dallas Museum of Art, 20 April 2006, as part of the Boshell Family Lecture Series on Archaeology
  • Listen (55 min)
  • Transcript
    
    
• Love of chocolate 'fuelled by naughty status' -- Telegraph (9 Septemberber 2007)
  
  
• A new breed of racing car runs on vegetable oil and chocolate -- The Scout Report (15 May 2009)
  
  
• The Origins of Chocolate -- The Vaults of Erowid
  
  
• Photo: First Edible Billboard -- National Geographic News (April 3, 2007)
  
  
• Psychoactive food: chocolate -- chocolate.org
  
  
• The science behind desire for chocolate -- Telegraph (15 October 07)
  
  
• Science and Nature - Chocolate -- BBC Science and Nature
  
  
• Chocolate: A Resource Guide. Science Reference Guide -- Library of Congress
  
  
• The sweet science of chocolate -- Exploratorium.edu
  
  
• Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne. A History of Food. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons/Blackwell 2009.
  
  
• Vail, Gabriel, "Cacao Use in Yucatán Among the Pre-Hispanic Maya" in Grivetti, Louis E., and Howard-Yana Shapiro, Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage. Wiley, 2009.
  
  
• World Cocoa Foundation
  
  
• Xocoatl - Chocolate guide

to top of page / A-Z index

"Since Pre-Columbian Mixtec documents are mainly concerned with histories, they record historical events such as royal births, wars and battles, royal marriages, forging of alliances, pilgrimages, and death of rulers. In addition to the calendrical signs used for dating events and naming individuals, the Mixtecs used a combination of conventionalized pictures as well as glyphs to illustrate the type and nature of the event. An example is … the wedding scene, usually shown as as two individuals of opposite sex facing each other and sitting on jaguar-pelt chairs, as illustrated by this example from the Codex Nuttall recording the marriage of the legendary Mixtec king 8 Deer "Tiger Claw" of Tilantongo to Lady 12 Snake on the day 13 Snake of the year 13 Reed (1051 CE)."

"This arrangement of the bride and groom is a purely pictorial convention, with no connection to the language. This means that no idiom or phrase in the Mixtec language describing two people sitting facing each other is a metaphor for marriage. However, the cup of chocolate held by Lady 13 Snake may represent the expression ynodzehua, which means "dowry" in Mixtec, where the root dzehua means "chocolate". Chocolate or cacao was one of the most expensive and luxurious products in Mesoamerica, and cacao beans were used as currency. It is no surprise the word for dowry would be based on chocolate."

ancientscripts.com/mixtec

Cocoa beans in a cocoa pod

Wikipedia