Ancient Trade Network, Etowah
Science just confirmed a vast cocoa trade network across the Americas.
Researchers studying pottery at the Etowah mound site in Georgia discovered the ancient residue of the cacao bean.
Cacao is a tropical rainforest tree. It is not native to Mexico, the Southwest, or the Eastern Woodlands.
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This Find Will Change Ancient American History
A new ancient DNA discovery at the Etowah Indian Mounds in Georgia has confirmed something archaeologists once thought they had found, and then backed away from: cacao in the Mississippian world nearly 1,000 years ago. Researchers found ancient Theobroma cacao DNA in pottery from 11th- and 12th-century contexts at Etowah. Even more important, the cacao comes from feasting deposits associated with the initial construction of Etowah’s first platform mound. The connection was already there while Etowah was being built. This is much bigger than the history of chocolate. For decades, American archaeology treated large-scale diffusion and connections between Mesoamerica, the American Southwest, the Eastern Woodlands and the Mississippian civilization with intense skepticism. But the physical evidence for an interconnected ancient America has continued to grow. Cacao had already been confirmed at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. Tropical scarlet macaws were transported north alive. Turquoise moved south into Mexico. Marine shell and other materials crossed enormous distances. Etowah itself was part of the vast Mississippian system connecting major centers across eastern North America. Now cacao DNA has appeared in Georgia. And the new Etowah study may reopen older evidence from Cahokia and sites throughout the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, where caffeinated residues were previously impossible to distinguish confidently between cacao and native yaupon holly. This video looks at the new Etowah discovery, the earlier research that almost found cacao there, the Smithsonian’s role in shaping American archaeology, how diffusionism became archaeological heresy, the catastrophic Indigenous population decline Europeans encountered after 1492, and why this new evidence adds another link to a much larger chain of proof. Ancient America was not a collection of isolated worlds. It was one vast interconnected civilization.
