Cacao DNA Found on Mississippian Pottery in Georgia
Chocolate comes from a tropical tree, and Georgia is far from the tropics. Yet DNA from the cacao tree turned up inside broken pottery from a Mississippian city nearly 1,000 years old.
Adam King of the University of South Carolina and eight colleagues report the finding in PLOS One. They found highly fragmented ancient Theobroma cacao DNA in residues from two Etowah Complicated Stamped pottery sherds recovered from 11th to 12th century contexts at the Etowah site, in northwest Georgia. Etowah was an Indigenous city that became one of the most important centers of the Mississippian world, reaching its peak in the 14th century.
From chemistry to DNA
The research began in 2014, when USC archaeologists worked with the Muscogee Nation to collect 31 pottery sherds from the Etowah mounds. Chemical analysis found theobromine, theophylline and caffeine on some of them, which are compounds associated with cacao. But the same compounds also occur in yaupon, a holly native to the American Southeast, so the chemistry alone could not settle the question. A later round of analysis sent three sherds for ancient DNA study, and two of them cleared the team’s threshold for identifying cacao.
Where the pottery came from
The sherds came from large pits full of animal bone, broken pottery and organic material that the researchers interpret as the remains of communal feasting. The pits were used as fill for Etowah’s earliest earthen mound. That puts the cacao in a ceremonial setting, and King said it suggests cacao was part of placing Etowah in the cosmos and tying its community members to it.
What is still uncertain
The paper’s methods section says the authors cannot be sure the sampled vessels actually held cacao, and that the presence of ancient cacao DNA is the significant finding. The team could not determine where the cacao came from or what route it took to Georgia. The authors suggest that other Etowah sherds with partial chemical signatures, and residues previously reported from Cahokia and other sites, deserve a second look.
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