More Than a Drink: Chocolate in the Pre-Columbian World

this program is a presentation of uctv for educational and non-commercial use only check out our YouTube original channel you see TV Prime at youtube.com slash you see TV prime subscribe today to get new programs every week well good afternoon on behalf of the Graduate Council the Academic Senate it is my very great pleasure to welcome you today the second of three Hitchcock lectures to be given by Professor Michael Co the Hitchcock endowment fund was established from a quest made by dr. Charles M Hitchcock in 1885 to Institute a professorship the University of California for free lectures upon scientific and practical subjects but not the advantage of any religious sect nor upon political subjects enlarged considerably in 1930 by his daughter mrs. Lilly Hitchcock Coit the fund has become one of the most cherished endowments University of California sustaining and encouraging recognition of the highest distinction in scholarly plot and achievement professor ko is a Charles Jay mccurdy professor of anthropology emeritus at Yale University his work centers around the ethno history of Mesoamerica and historical archaeology of the northeastern United States these contributions to these fields has significantly influenced our understanding of the evolution of ancient civilizations professor Coase received many awards and honors for his work including election to the National Academy of Sciences he has also been a senior fellow with the National Endowment for the Humanities and has served as curator of anthropology at the Peabody Museum of Anthropology a member of the Advisory Board the Plains Indian Museum in Cody Wyoming and as a trustee of the Mount Lebanon Shaker Village prolific author professor Co has written numerous books on Mayan and Olmec culture art and writing systems as well as several other Mesoamerican themes the work you heard about yesterday based on his best-selling book breaking the Maya code describes the scholarly communities many unsuccessful attempts at decipherment which finally culminated in a successful breakthrough this book was heralded by the New York Times is one of the great stories of 20th century scientific discovery he is also an extensively about the society and culture described in these ancient inscriptions another book the true history of chocolate written with Sophie dqo is a fascinating tale focusing on the discovery manufacture and use of chocolate in Mesoamerica its subsequent introduction to Europe and its present-day use in his lecture today entitled more than a drink chocolate in the pre-columbian world professor ko explores a history of chocolate and the cultural practices and beliefs related to this confectionery delight in the ancient cultures of the American continent without further delay i'm pleased to present to you professor michael coe well good afternoon for once I'm giving a lecture that does have some practical value chocolate is a major industry in this country in Europe and other parts of the world let's see if I can closer to the microphone I should have a mic here a lapel mic can you hear if I work out like that okay I'll just talk a little louder chocolate is of course I don't know how many chocoholics are in the audience but chocolate is a major industry of the largest food industries in the world are great producers of chocolate such as the Nestle corporation and of course Hershey's and Mars and in this country but it's got a long long history that most people don't know about in a very important history related to the ancient peoples of Mesoamerica Mexico and Central America in pre-hispanic times I never thought that I would ever be writing a book on this subject or standing on a lecture platform talking about chocolate but my wife my late wife Sophie was a keulen era historian and she was a specialist in the ancient cuisines of Mexico Central America the Mayan Aztec in particular and Peru the Andes and in her last year she got tremendously interested in chocolate because she felt this was a subject that really there's so much on and there's so much absolute blarney written about it by so-called food historians who write for you know the popular magazines like gourmet and so forth but she felt something ought to be done to to correct this the true story is much more interesting than all the guff that you read on particularly on the internet now if you click on some of the major chocolate companies they've all got a little history section and it's completely wrong so she wanted to tell the true story she unfortunately never lived to see the book more than a couple of chapters into it and I promised her that I'd finish it for her so I did and I had a wonderful time doing it it really got me into a world that I I didn't know about and that I should have known about because the people who I study the Mayans and Aztecs and their predecessors chocolate was enormous ly important to these people not just as a drink because they drank it rather than ate it up out of a candy wrapper the way we do they drink they drank it all right but it was a money to these people the chocolate bean was a unit of currency of small change and somebody in fact it was of my colleague now retired Renee Mellon who when he was a graduate student wrote his PhD thesis for Columbia University on cacao and chocolate and called it when money grew on trees I think it's the best title anybody ever got for PhD theses anyway so it's a really interesting story and I'm going to tell you something about this and what it means for particular Maya archaeology and the understanding of the Aztec people who came later in central Mexico so if we could have the first slide I'll tell you something about chocolate that perhaps some of you know but probably most of you don't know could we dim the lights here please that'd be thank you see if I get this a little bit of focus chocolate comes from a plant called Theobroma cacao the cacao tree it was named by the great Swedish 18th century Swedish botanist Carlini Linnaeus and he called it Theobroma the drink of the gods and cacao because that was the ancient name for this plant and the product in Mexico and Central America among both the Aztecs and Mayans and in fact among most peoples of that part of the world the tree itself is a tropical forest tree it's a small spindly little tree that ever really amounts to much it's an understory tree that grows in the naturally in the wild below much higher trees that shaded and that's the habitat that it likes it's pollinated by little time it's got little tiny flowers that are pollinated by midges which you can barely say so it needs a kind of a messy environment with a lot of junk lying around on the ground rotting fruit and things like this and which midges can can really have a wonderful life and they are the ones who pollinate this thing as a typical tropical forest tree where many trees are have this strange form of bearing their flowers and their fruit not on the ends of the tips of the branches or on the twigs but rather on the trunk itself so these little tiny flowers are eventually pollinated and they grow up to be fruit and the fruit pops out from the side of the tree here in this plant growing down in Billie's is a Pheo broma cacao tree a cacao tree and it produces these pods which can be like the size of a small football ridged there is no way that you would think if you broke one of those things open but that's the sort of the cacao that produces chocolate but it is this happens to be in Bali a friend of Balinese friend of mine cacao has now grown all over the world in the tropics wherever there's enough rainfall and the right kind of environment and rights rich soils it is grown commercially and they grow it in Bali in large parts of Indonesia as well as Africa and other places so he's broken open this cacao my friend the booty here to show you what's inside it and that doesn't look like chocolate at all does it it's got a these flip seeds inside it that are coated with this kind of white almost translucent fleshy material that is extraordinarily sweet it's actually delicious if you chew this stuff off the sea that's on the inside it's really wonderful and that that is what the some of the disperses of cacao and nature love it's often dispersed by monkeys who come after this stuff and break open and also parrots break open the pods and eat the fruit and then of course finally expel the seeds there after this I won't eat the seeds because the seeds are bitter because they're full of alkaloids so how do you turn this thing into chocolate there it is there you can see some pods this is in Tabasco in Mexico broken open to show this fleshy fruit these seeds are our flat the the Spaniards called them when they're dried they dried inside they look like almonds and they call them amendments in Spanish there they're really quite distinctive but the this pulp itself is really quite delicious and I'm surprised that kind of fruit isn't sold in the markets because it's sort of like lychees they're really good to eat so how do they turn this stuff into chocolate you they have to the people who grow cacao who harvest it they harvest these pods when they're ripe break them open and dump the contents out often into a trough or basket or something like that and then because there's so much sugar in that sweet pulp it starts fermenting in the this being the tropics and it builds up quite a temperature finally all that pulp that has fermented runs off as a kind of a wine and as a matter of fact you can drink it and get a buzz on and again I'm surprised somebody hasn't thought of commercializing this kind of thing it doesn't if you ate that seed it wouldn't taste the least bit like a cow you wouldn't like it it bitter you want to spit it out it wouldn't taste at all chocolatey so what has to happen finally then once all that stuff has gotten off the seeds the fermentation takes place then the seeds have to be dried the kernels that are inside there that witness Vanya's call the elementals and here they are being sun dried today visits of course commercially in ovens of the big chocolate companies but the process that was discovered thousands of years ago in Mesa America for processing that's exactly in theory and in almost in practice the same has used today by big companies like Hershey so here it is you have to dry these seeds then these seeds have to be winnowed and roasted and they've got a sort of a thin shell on the outside that you have to take off and the roasting process has to take place and until all of that takes place of fermentation the drying the the winnowing and roasting and so forth there's no chocolate flavor whatsoever in that stuff it's only when that happens that you had the chocolate flavor then in a meso America in Mexico and Central America in pre-hispanic times they would put these he's a pile of them now all processed and roasted they would place him on a metate a stone grinding stone same that you used to grind up corn for to making Tunisia Tamil to turn into tortillas and they would grind this up this Matata had to be heated though the during the grinding process there has to be heat applied so they built a fire underneath this thing so that it was really quite hot when they ground it and this again the heat is something when they grind today they still have to do that same thing to get the chocolate flavor the end product of all of this of these grinding these seeds and what nut is finally turned into a solid paste which is really pure cacao it's got a lot of cacao butter in it and it has all the goodies all the wonderful flavor the best quality chocolate contains a lot of this of these what they call cocoa solids with the the cocoa butter and all the rest of it in it to make it delicious and if you want to buy the best quality chocolate you get that it's supposed to have 50 for at least 50% of this stuff in it the Aztecs then took this we know a lot about Aztec chocolate preparation then they would take that and they would beat it up in water mix it up with water and then add various spices this is one of the spices that they used another Mesoamerican invention which is vanilla those are vanilla beans vanilla is the fermented and dried bean another complex process of a of an orchid the vanilla orchid which grows again in the tropics and that was one of the many many flavorings they used they could add into the drink here they could add chili pepper which it goes wonderfully with chocolate actually if you want something really good try chili pepper the next time you make chocolate ice cream mix up some chili pepper in it you get a wonderful after burn into your nice cool chocolate it's one of these energetic actions really marvelous and I'm surprised Ben and Jerry haven't gotten under this one so that's basically that's how it's done so there are the there is the whole process from beginning to end fermentation drying roasting winnowing and grinding now chocolate is a very complicated chemically a very complicated thing pure chocolate it's probably got more than 200 different substances in it nobody has ever been able to synthesize it thank God nobody really knows all the things that are in chocolate it is so complex incredibly chemically complex how was it that the peoples of Mexico and Central America hit on making this stuff to me it still to find out that if you do all this stuff to the sea that's inside there it's going to turn out to be chocolate it's still a mystery to me now in late pre-hispanic times on the eve of the Spanish conquest these were the major chocolate producing areas of Mexico and Central America mainly in the lowlands here in fact entirely along the loans chocolate cut the cacao tree cannot grow whether it's frost it has to be in a frost free area and it has to be with an area with a lot of rainfall and of course the lowlands of Mesoamerica southern Veracruz the Yucatan Peninsula specially Tabasco in here down along the coast here and Belize and especially along the Pacific coast plain here is where Jacqueline was produced the greatest chocolate really came from this area here the ancient Aztec Chicano Chico province called SoCo nuts go today in southeastern Chiapas and just a little bit into Guatemala that's where the very top quality chocolate came from a variety of cacao trees that grew and still grow there produces the best chocolate of all what we call Criollo chocolate this has been taken to Venezuela and a few other places and the top chocolate the really gourmet chocolates of the world use Criollo chocolate from here it's from here that the Aztecs appear the Aztec nobility and royalty got their chocolate and it's the same kind of chocolate that eventually was called upon by the ruling by the royal house in Spain when chocolate went to the old world so that's where chocolate was grown now who did this and when who invented this turning this thing that doesn't look the slightest bit or taste the slightest bit like chocolate into chocolate this complex process there's a lot of controversy about this now my wife and I thought we had the answer and I still think we have it Karen Dakin who's an expert on the language of the Aztecs Nahuatl and related languages claims that the people who spoke Nahuatl did this I think that it was the people who spoke a group of languages that are called me hey so kyun which are spoken which were spoken in this area still are spoken in this area a year John justices and Terry Kaufman two experts on me hey Sookie and languages have pointed out that for the Maya or for the asmik peoples up here and other peoples of civilized peoples of may pre-hispanic Mesa of America the me hey Sol Qian language was a giver of high culture terms terms like incense and a host of other things that related to the presence of a very high sophisticated civilization there are reasons to think that the Olmec people who are in this area here from about 1500 BC to about 400 BC and who created the first civilization of May so America that they spoke me hey Sookie and I'm convinced that this is true an ancestral form of me hey so Qian rather than Maya or Nahuatl or any of these other languages if so well let's just say Kaufman and justice and felt and I still believe they're correct that the word cacao the ancient word for chocolate was a loanword out of me hey so kyun that it's a me hey Sookie and origin and if so it's suggested to to us at any rate my wife and myself and again I think we're right that the Olmecs were the ones who did this the Olmecs of course are probably well known to you as the producers of these great these colossal heads this one is over nine feet high in ways many many tons I created these vessel monuments up to 20 tons they were incredible sculptors of incredible builders of giant earthworks and pyramids the beautiful Jade's were carved by these people they invented many of the things in which the later civilizations drew upon they were the ancient culture the way Greece and Rome is the ancient culture for peoples of European descent the old necks were for the Mesa WA mericans and as I say they their Senate was down on the Gulf Coast in an area that today still you can find cacao grown all through this river system here in Olmec country here is where this is what we call the Olmec heartland here and all the colossal heads that are known come from this region here I worked there for three years so I'm an old Mac buff I really believe that these people were in the ancient civilization and that they were the ones who hit upon somehow or another I don't know how they did it Manufacturing chocolate out of this rather odd plant at any rate regardless of that we know who the next people were who had chocolate and the next people because this is well documented by the Maya themselves where the lowland Maya this is the Maya area the Yucatan Peninsula neighboring Guatemala down here Belize which some Guatemalan has not put the border here properly southeastern Mexico here the state of Chiapas in this region here Maya civilisation arose certainly not long after the time of Christ and by 250 AD we entered what we call a classic period of Maya civilization all the great cities that we know about such as Tikal copan palenque and so forth they are creations of the classic period and then it finally by eight to nine hundred ad it began collapsing for reasons that are we're getting a handle on but not entirely sure about at any rate by early in the fifth century the Mayas had were starting to talk and write about chocolate and the evidence for this came up not so many years ago from a site in northeastern Guatemala in fact I'll show you exactly where it is right up in this region here called Rio wasu attacked by a team from the from Texas as a matter of fact from San Antonio this is a National Geographic reconstruction of a great burial that was going to take place right next to a major Maya pyramid in Rio Azul in the 5th century AD and a burial of one of the great kings of Rio Azul what we call the holy king of Rio 'soul this was an intact tomb when the archaeologists went in when many of the tombs of reiatsu had been looted by the time they got there by people for the antiquities market but this one was intact and there it was in dug down into the limestone itself right next to the pyramid and here is the king the remains of the King there's his skull there all these organic remains probably represent all of his finery his cats all feathers as textiles and one of the wooden things like masks and so forth that it all disappeared because it's a very hot wet climate on the walls are figures of major gods in the Maya Pantheon this happens to be a figure of the Sun God of the last creation was a gigantic and sinister macaw bird those of you who read the Popol Vuh that's a head of woo kook a quiche himself but at any rate let's look down here in every Maya tomb classic tomb that we know about of any interest there is a whole lot of vessels there pottery vessels and vessels made out of other things that contain the food and drink that were put with this person to take into the other world and this all this is all from the late 5th century there are cylindrical vessels here we know that these bowls like this contained tamales almost certainly offerings of corn tamales to go with him into the underworld into Sheba love among the vessels that were found in this particular tomb at rio azul 219 with this strange phase and several others this is got a strange thing with a handle on it it's actually pottery it's been stuccoed and painted with hieroglyphs it's actually a screw top you can screw and unscrew it it sort of like a mason jar and it's sitting on a pot stand here inside this and on several other vessels we're sort of residual rings like the ring or around a very dirty and unwashed bathtub obviously the remains of some liquid that it contained now the next step is i want you to look at this hieroglyph right here this one this hieroglyph here we can read it tells us that this is somebody's vessel and it contains a drink what drink well this is where the epigraph is come in David Stuart who is now on the faculty at Harvard and who was the youngest receiver ever of the MacArthur Genius Prize and he really is a genius he looked at the hieroglyph on that and he cracked it he deciphered it the one that I pointed out and here is the way it it if you heard my last lecture you will know that the Maya had a syllabary in their writing system they also had weird signs which we call logger grass and those two things put together make the Maya hieroglyphic writing system but they could write anything in syllables just like you can write your name in syllables here teacher in school may have told you to pronounce your name in syllables well that's the way the Maya writing system work so here is the hieroglyph his drawing of the hieroglyph that was on that particular screw-top jar in Rio a so and it says here cough that's what a comb sign is Cod's actually a fish fin this fish head is another form of it where this little fin sticking out is also cough the syllable kha and these two dots up here this doesn't have to be here these two dots will tell you that this is the same syllable repeated twice it says do it twice over and this we know thanks to my colleague Floyd Lounsbury linguist at Yale is to be read as what so caca wat in the Maya system this is the way they would write it so that the last what's M this should be a W the vowel that goes with it is not pronounced so this is cacao they are writing cacao or chocolate on it they're telling you that there's chocolate inside this this is another glyph that he deciphered that you get elsewhere and on other vessels and it says suckle which means white maize gruel atole atole still drunk today in Mexico but this is the one we're concerned about so they sent ok so here's here's how they did it they submitted who took those vases and sent them up to the Hershey lab in Pennsylvania pa and lo and behold they can't reprove to contain two alkaloids one of them is caffeine you know which is the active alkaloid and coffee and a lot of other things the other one is theobromine and in the this particular part of the world the only plant that really produces these two things that only the plant that is eaten or drunk that produces these two things together caffeine Athiya bromine is the chocolate tree cacao so QED it's chocolate and so now we know it was beautiful case of science coming together with a pig Rafi and with Maya archaeology to answer this so here it is again there's the two dots which tell you that this is to be repeated twice cop wat cacao and that is taken off another Maya vase every single cylindrical vase almost from the Maya area and we have hundreds perhaps thousands of them now but have hieroglyphic bands around them they always tell you up on top but this is a vase it contains a drink and they'll tell you what the drink is and the drink is always cacao and I'll show you this and there are four known Maya books this is a view of one of them they very very very late almost early colonial perhaps in my estimation Maya manuscript that's in Madrid it's a codex in the Madrid codex very crude compared to what the Classic Maya must have had but at any rate this is what we're stuck with but here is a god seated here and he's hanging on to a sort of what looked like branches with cacao pods on them and there's a Quetzal bird up here flying along with chewing a cacao pod and up here my colleague Floyd Lansbury Eddy ale saw that this is kah this is cut and here's the Wat again that's cacao which is this describes these hieroglyphs describes what's going on in the picture down down below so we know what cacao looks like in ancient times there is where Rio Azul was there's where Tikal is and these are all classic Maya cities that have many of which have been excavated wash achtung which was excavated in the 1930s by the Carnegie Institution in Washington turned out to have a number of very important tombs deeply buried in the structures that belong to the early classic period 5th and 6th centuries ad and I just want to show you an archeological drawing of one of these tombs at watch Achtung where the dead man is here this by the way in red is a stingray spine of the ancient Maya were heavily into what do they call it the body piercing except that it appears the most unfortunate part of their Anatomy the male's had to pierce the penis and a male royalty and that's what that's all about there but all these vessels here all these dishes almost certainly contain corn in one product or another almost certainly tamales usually and all these ones that I've colored in and brown are lidded vessels that are chocolate vessels that's how much chocolate was put for the trip into the underworld by an important Maya ruler of watch Achtung in the late fifth century here are these chocolate pots from this particular tomb here with their lids and so forth and we we know that they contained important things almost certainly chocolate in all cases because we have pictorial Maya vases showing Palace scenes in which these plots with the tops are placed next to the Lord as an offering there is one Maya monument carved stone monument from the site of Piedras Negras down on the OOH cement Center River which divides Guatemala from Mexico it's on the Guatemalan side the river of ruins is it's called Piedras Negras is a major Maya City Classic Maya this is a late Classic Maya monument from the eighth century AD a panel that was once fixed into a probably into a palace wall and it shows a Maya King here in this sort of recessed area Maya King up here it's much smashed up but he's talking to a group of people who were standing here another group here and another group down here the a date is over here which tells you when it happened his name occurs up here several times he's talking amongst the people that he's talking to is a delegation from a city upstream according to this text a site called a city called yaxchilan and it's a very important diplomatic meeting going on apparently at night time and it's a feast it's actually a party that's being given and he's talking to all of these people this is conversation here off on this side is a master of ceremonies whose name is given here how South John Cowell and he is in a knockin the keeper he's the Royal librarian the keeper of the holy books and he's the master of ceremonies this gent with a sarong down here are the participants whose names and titles are given here one of them is a scribe and an artist and here is a that same kind of chocolate pot and it's referred to in the text up there so this chocolate is an important thing to get people together we know that it was used that way by the Aztecs during very very important meetings of the merchants for instance they had a chocolate feast in which chocolate was the main thing that was imbibed at that point it had much more than just a recreational thing this chocolate drink it was a social binder and in particular among the Maya we do know in the past and in colonial times that even among some modern Maya people's it's used to submit wedding negotiations and given during wedding parties well this brings us to a one of the largest of all classic Maya sites Tikal in central and north-central paths in northern Guatemala and this particular temple pyramid has a tomb inside it this is a temple one and the archaeologists from pen found a fantastic tomb there back in the 1960s which they excavated which turned out to be the tomb of a guy also named Hassan Cowell who was the holy king of Tikal and one of the most important of all Maya rulers let's see if I got this right that's his tomb and in the tomb you can see all these chocolate pots that are arranged here who's unfortunately the archaeologist washed out all those things they didn't think that one ought to not do that and submit and find out what the residues are inside those vessels now today they know what to do because there's all kinds of chemistry that can be done on what's in there and trying to identify food remains today right this guy did have a whole array of these things including one in Jade this is from his tomb here and it says upon the lid in hieroglyphs that tells you that this is for cacao for chocolate so they were keeping the chocolate drink here this is from another of Maya tomb but people think might be the son of us out Janka will forget what it says up here about his name we now know what his name is we can read the hieroglyphs but all made out of jade plaques probably affixed through a wooden container inside now did they really drink out of something like this if you try to pick up a vase that big and drink it you get hot chocolate or cold chocolate all over yourself it would be a mess this isn't the way it worked and this isn't not what they were for here is a Maya classic Lake Classic Maya vase from we don't know what site it's from its in the collection of Dumbarton Oaks in Washington and it's got an inscription up here secondary ones here but I want to show you this unrolled unrolled by an artist that I had working for me and it shows the King seated here in his palace this is the palace here with various underlings offering this guy's offering some small tamales to him and off here on one side is this figure here who was holding in his hand one of these chocolate bearing vases just like the one that you're seeing up here and this is the name of the person who commissioned this particular pot who owned it with and he's the son of this person here who comes from this city here and we don't know where that city is unfortunately here is another unrolled Bayes unrolled by my friend Justin Kerr a photographer in New York and a great Maya scholar who has unrolled thousands of Classic Maya vases photographically and it shows the king up here very complicated Palace scene with various offerings being brought into him a cloth bags here and we're now sure that those sacks contain chocolate beans large quantities of chocolate beans cacao beans were brought in as tribute and as offerings to important Maya Kings he's also got a couple of captives down here that have been presented to him who are going to have their heads chopped off after lengthy torture so what did they drink out of well this is from another classic Meyer visit sit down in the in Australia and the Australian National Museum and it shows a dwarf who is very important to work dwarfs were important among the Classic Maya in the courts just as they were in Renaissance Europe and this very important dwarf is drinking from a cup from a bowl that's probably a gourd that's been cut like this and that's what you really drank out of so what did you use those tall cylindrical pottery faces for I'll show you this is another unrolling by Justin Kerr of one of the most beautiful of all Classic Maya vases it's in the Princeton Art Museum now it's called the Princeton vase Lake Classic Maya and I can't describe the whole thing to you but there's a palace seen inside elevation a very important god of the Maya whose name we don't know we called him God ljust the letter L attached to him with five beautiful lovely ladies here in his court and a sacrificial scene going on on this side a little rabbit writing a Maya codex a folding screen codex down here got his little quill pen in his hand down here but I want to point out what this lady is doing over here I'll show you this in drawing she has one of the cylindrical vases in her head and she's pouring this liquid out into another phase here now it's got to be chocolate and why is she doing that we haven't a very early post-conquest see codex Cola today Ella no in Madrid from the central Mexican area describing the life of the Aztecs and it shows an Aztec woman this is a late 16th century a very accurate drawing here showing an Aztec woman pouring this stuff from one base into another and we know from the text there that this is chocolate and why did they do it to put a head on it the head the froth on the top of a chocolate was considered terrific this is just as though you got your beer not for the beer but for the head on top the Aztecs and all the other people's amazing American considered considered the froth the top quality stuff and they spoon it out with with with bone spoons or spoons made out of turtle shell this was considered to be the ultimate thing and then you would drink what was in it then below sitting like eating a Peking duck where you eat the skin first and then that's the top the really the great stuff and then as an afterthought you'll eat the rest of the duck it's the same way with this you eat the froth first and then drink the drink afterwards so that's what they were doing and they certainly put up for Auton it as you can see from this rolled out a occur roll out here of a classic Maya Bay's and shows the the chocolate froth on the top the underling here kneeling in front of his lord this is a holy Maya Lord he's got a bunch of tamales with sauce on top of him corn tamales and offerings of cats all feathers and other things being brought into him this is probably a marriage negotiation going on the go-between working out the terms of a royal marriage because that's what chocolate was was used well we know throughout the Maya area for a thousand years the Maya is so important was it to the Maya that they had a chocolate God he doesn't show up very often but here he isn't a medallion on an early classic Maya vase at Dumbarton Oaks and this guy is pointing to one of these chocolate pots probably had chocolate in it and he's got cacao pods popping out from all over his body and so he himself were the trunk of a of a tree and he's marked with with sort of tree and earth markings going all around him so that's and that's his name up there now the Maya were the only ones to be interested in pre-columbian America in chocolate up in central Mexico the greatest of all cities in the entire pre-columbian new world was Teotihuacan but you go to its northeast of Mexico City still in the valley of Mexico it was the largest city in all of pre-columbian America this is looking at south along the Avenue of the Dead the Pyramid of the Sun here tremendous urban conglomeration and we do know that they took chocolate there because there are representations of it this was tremendously important the city during the early classic period until about six or 6:58 when the whole city was destroyed and burned to the ground by hands unknown but this is from Teotihuacan a fragment of a carved vase showing a cylindrical vase showing a a blow gunner with his blowgun pellet in his hand and there's a cacao tree up here with a cat solve bird sitting up in it and he's going to pop off this cat solve bird but it is a representation of cacao the turkey walk on people probably controlled silken us Co the cacao area along the Pacific coast they definitely had it another pre-columbian people who had cacao and I think they all had it eventually at one point or another with the Miche tax in Oaxaca and southern Mexico the Miche tax royal families occupied the tops of whole series of mountains all over the valley of Oaxaca and in the rest of over a much of northern Oaxaca and very warlike people and we know a lot about their history because there have been many mesh tech books folding screen books or codices on on deerskin that have survived until today this is a detail of one of these mystic codices from the Postclassic period probably as late as a 15th century ad showing an extremely important mission at king whose name is 8 that's the number 8 and that's a deer head this is 8 deer who conquered a large part of mitch tech country and whose marriages and conquests are celebrated in several of these manuscripts this one happens to be in the British Museum and here is his spouse over here and they are getting married on this particular date and they've got a nice frothy jar of chocolate to celebrate that another place where you find cacao representations but no actual cacao is down in the same country that produces vanilla where vanilla was probably invented were the people who discovered how to process the vanilla orchid into a bean and this is a site of el tajin in Veracruz and a huge huge city that we barely know at all because it's been very badly excavated unfortunately but which has a wonderful representation of a cacao tree being worshipped on a step pyramid here this is probably a mountain top and they've got a cacao tree up here with the pods coming off it and this figure is going up to apparently make an offering to the cacao tree on top another place that where you find a very important one where you find representations of cacao is the site of Kokoschka this is really being uncovered right now this is up just east of the valley of Mexico right on the fringes of that the center of the Aztec empire and it's got wonderful murals in it it's a palace that has been uncovered by Mexican archaeologists with splendid murals that are not in central Mexican style at all but rather Maya it shows that the Maya had intruded up here probably in the 9th century AD and shows Maya rulers in the guise of Maya God's carrying Maya paraphernalia and so forth really important is the presence here of our friend god el you saw him on that Princeton vase here he is here he's a God of merchants and he's got his merchant pack in which he's got Quetzal feathers and he's got a turtle shell and there's other things there's his hat that he's brought in and he's looking over here at a cacao tree a fantastic cacao tree in which the tiny flowers have been blown up hugely by artistic license here I believe that the Maya introduced or reintroduced cacao to in the ninth century back into the central highlands of Mexico and it was a knowledge of this that the when the Aztecs first came into central Mexico they discovered that they really wanted to drink chocolate now the Aztecs all claimed to have come from up in northwestern Mexico down into the region of central Mexico as conquerors they took over the old civilizations of central Mexico going back to Teotihuacan but I think they were also influenced by the Maya they knew about the Maya way to the east here they never conquered them but they had them as a super civilized people the way we look back on the Greeks as super civilized people and they were definitely influenced through the site of Kokoschka I think right up here in this area but at any rate they eventually by the late 14th and 15th centuries had created a mighty empire and this is a full extent of it which included Chaco nacho this area they went down there so that they could have the best source of the best cacao going the Aztec armies were the most formidable armies that had ever been seen in meso America fighting with terrible weapons the sword clubs set with obsidian blades that the Spaniards were terrified of this I could take a horse and just cut him in half they were so sharp they could actually cut right through chain mail and the spaniel introduced horrible wounds and by means of arms like this and they're really incredible military organization they managed to conquer large hunks of meso America but never the Maya they had good trading relationships with them because they got important things that they needed from the Maya this is a kind of recreation of downtown Mexico City as it was on the eve of the Spanish conquest with a great trying to focus it I think it's a great double pyramid here in the center and dedicated to the rain God into the Aztec war God it was a huge city Tenochtitlan and we know a lot about the Aztecs because in once they were conquered the Aztec intellectuals and Franciscan friars many of whom were very good scholars began to study Aztec culture and write it up and we have a whole whole encyclopedia for instance written by one Spaniard father saw how gone that is the first piece of ethnography ever done in the world which gives us a huge amount of knowledge the Aztecs of course told us that first of all that they use cacao for money and there's a lot on this we know as a matter of fact from some of our sources how much so many cacao beans could buy and so forth so it was valuable not only as a drink but also as small change and all kinds of transactions people were paid in chocolate beans there's some wonderful Azteca ethnography about their attitude towards chocolate it was a holy drink to them it was equated with blood the blood of sacrificed people there's all sorts of stuff about this they felt that it could only be drunk by the nobility and by by high-ranking warriors it was restricted to that the ordinary guy in the street could not drink it it was an elite drink and it had all kinds of associations for instance there's one account of an Aztec very important Aztec sacrifice in which a young captive perfect captive was selected to dance all night as the god he he acted as a god sometimes for as much as a year and at the end of this he had to perform his last dance dance business joyous dance and then the next morning he was sacrifice well sometimes these captives got chicken and you know they they showed us the signs of terror though they didn't want to be sacrificed even though it was considered to be a great honor they went right to the heaven of the Sun God but the guy said no include me out easily Sam Goldwyn said they didn't want any part of it so what they would do would be to take the sacrificial knife and here is an actual Aztec sacrificial knife wash the blood off of it and mix it up with chocolate and then give it to him this was considered cold knife washing chocolate and he would come up you know like a lion after that forget the fact that he was going to be sacrificed and dance joyously at least this is what our sources say I think I'd be continuously chicken under those circumstances at any rate we know that there were was a tremendous amount of tribute that came in and see if I can focus it a tremendous and we have the Aztec tribute listen tremendous amounts of tribute came in from the conquered provinces into the Aztec coffers and into the Royal Palace here is all the tribute from the province of Chicano Chico so conozco down there in southeastern meso America and not surprisingly includes vast quantities of chocolate these are bales of chocolate coming in that's a chocolate bean to label it Jaguar skins feathers beautiful birds and so forth came in from this province into the Aztec royal house brought in on the backs of traders and brought in on the backs of perhaps serfs who were from that conquered province bringing it in over hill and Bale into Tenochtitlan the island capital in the middle of that great lake that's now underneath Mexico City to present to the ruler that's the ruler Mitaka sole mothers is insignia their mothers uma and here they are bringing in all kinds of war costumes and other things into his coffers the spaniards tell us something about his storehouses the aztec rulers had enormous storehouses of cacao it's sort of like having fort knox underneath your palace because this stuff was money as well as something to drink during important festivities there's even a description by the famous conqueror Bernal Diaz del Castillo who wrote the true history of the conquest of Mexico about the banquet of the Emperor Motech Isola is a cutaway view of his palace in which he was supposed to draw hundreds of cups of chocolate well that's baloney nobody can drink hundreds of cups of chocolate he drank and ate very sparingly but all of his people around him did this and participated in this chocolate was passed at fiestas at the very end it's the way you'd hand out brandy or port at the end of a fine banquet and perhaps passing cigars around and they also smoked at that point and did pass the equivalent of cigars so it was not taken lightly it was an elite drink always the Aztec nobility however we had mixed feelings about this they knew that this was an exotic drink and they were very puritanical in many ways that's the king that's awell pili who was a cousin of Montezuma and the ruler of the allied city of cocoa on the other eastern side of the lake they knew that this stuff was exotic that it had come from the lowlands from people who they considered a feat they were a warrior people who had a savage past and they thought that this was stuff it was under money there's a lot of Mythology about this undermining the strength of the aspects they gotten soft when they moved into these civilized areas from where they come from so they always had these ambivalent feelings about chocolate even though occasionally it will show up in their sculpture what they really thought with the drink for warriors and for you know macho's and mention was poking which they called oakley a native kind of wine that is the SAP of the inflorescence of the century plant here's a century plan here which they sucked out as its going to put it shoot up they cut it and they suck out the juice and the juice was then fermented to make into a kind of a beer they call it today we can you can go and have it the day in Mexico City and what a cold pool Cody is it's really quite good full of vitamins but it smells so the tourist department is trying to wipe it out because the gringos won't like it here is pulque in a glass and in a gourd bowl and this is what you're told should be drunk now it is alcoholic and they also had great prohibitions of about getting drunk Aztec laws were draconian and the usual punishment for public drunkenness was death except in the case of old folks like myself we can truck as we wanted well and the Spaniards come in and put an end to meso American civilization and yet many things did not die out including chocolate at first the Spaniards were horrified by chocolate they saw these people drinking this this brown rather unpleasant looking stuff they tried it it was bitter to them they didn't like it at all at first and then they got to like it especially the Spanish women who came over eventually and out stood the Indian mistresses that they've taken they began to drink it with a lot of sweetening in it the Spaniards brought sugar to the New World Cortes was want to had huge sugar plantations mainly worked by African slaves that they brought over and this sugar mostly was destined to be put to mix up with a bitter chocolate so that they found it palatable eventually this they added various things to it I believe that the the froth of making Milenio today what you can see in Mexican restaurants and markets and houses to make that froth on the chocolate with a Spanish introduction the old method is to pour it from on a height from one pot then into the other one to get the froth on it but at any rate they added various things - including all kinds of old-world spices like cinnamon and so forth and then it went back across the ocean to Europe and where it went to Spain first into the Spanish Court as an elite drink always the travel almost entirely as an elite drink through Europe it had to be blended in with absolute insane ideas that the Europeans had about medicine and about the body the for the idea of four humors and it had to be brought into this system inherited from the Greeks about the balance of the different these liquids inside the body these humors which are absolutely insane stupid ideas they were miles behind the Aztecs as far as medicine went but at any rate once they had done that then it was incorporated into something that all the elite of Europe are wanted and it spreads through Europe this is from a Spanish set of Spanish tiles showing them making this stuff frothing it up here to get the froth over here in a in a chocolate era and whatnot and drunk again as a very strong drink pure chocolate with all of these additions the French got it eventually this is for a page from d-day rose famous encyclopedia and if you look at this the system that's being used here in the 18th century Paris is no different than what the Mesa Americans the new thousands of years before the heat up the metate here now all of this stuff all of the process is exactly the same there were no technological advances whatsoever as far as chocolate went until the beginning of the 19th century this is the way an upper-class woman in would take this is by the Swiss artist Liotta and shows a morning chocolate being brought into this lady along with the war and this stuff was strong it was real chocolate it was probably about 95% chocolate what we call cocoa solids now everything went along swimmingly like that with chocolate there was the real stuff it was drunken chocolate houses in England all over the continent into Russia and whatnot until this guy came along this is Conrad Van Houten a Dutchman who was a confectioner and he that a method for taking the fat out of chocolate this fat is cocoa butter which is delicious it's wonderful stuff he got this spoil sport got rid of it and the resulting powder which is cocoa powder that you put into a cup of cocoa could now be made into a cheap drink for the masses and also turned into solid chocolate bars and confectionery coatings and things of this sort the chocolate industry really begins with Conrad Van Hollen's a great discovery and all chocolate from now on is basically going to be solid chocolate and this week stuff which we call cocoa having taken the the expensive cocoa butter out of the chocolate which by the way today the manufacturers extract it and sell it to the pharmaceutical companies and things like this because it has the it melts at a body temperature so you can use it for cosmetics lipstick and things like this all sorts of uses they sell that a lot of money then the chocolate companies and then they put in cheap fat into the chocolate made out of soybeans a cheap substitute because nothing practically they also added milk the Swiss invented this the chocolate so milk being cheap in Switzerland and sugar being relatively cheap the chocolate bars like this one here turn out to be mostly sugar and synthetic fat and milk the expensive stuff the real chocolate is less than 15% in the typical chocolate bar chocolate then being industrialized then spreads all over brought by the colonial powers all over the world today the leading producer of chocolate is Africa right here West Africa and this chocolate is the African chocolate is what you probably eat if you eat a Hershey bar they're not going to put the expensive stuff in that they're going to put in this kind of chocolate the most of the commercial manufacturers use that mass chocolate so chocolate is now for the masses but mr. Hershey was a genius and industrial genius I would call him the the Henry Ford of the confectionery and food industry and he was a wonderful man actually a real social pioneer Hershey Pennsylvania is an ideal town with completely built on mr. Hershey every possible amenity that you could imagine golf courses theaters the works cradle to grave paternalism and it's an enormous it's one of the great food companies of the world but Hershey's chocolate the experts on chocolate who go in for a really top quality chocolate call it junk chocolate because it and Cadbury's and all the rest of them are basically less than 15 percent real chocolate its chocolate flavored fat and sugar is what you're eating when you eat one of these things well a lot of nuts in it too so the system is no different today than it was in the past the manufactory lies down mass production which Hershey and the Cadbury's in England and the fries in England really invented so that's what you you have today course these are old Hershey chocolates it doesn't bear much relationship to the history of chocolate for thousands of years and basically it has lost all of its social and political and cultural content and basically it's lost all of its flavor however there are top quality chocolate producers today there's a great movement even in the Hershey corporation I discovered when I talked to a whole bunch of Hershey scientists not so long ago and Mars people from the Mars company they're looking for top quality chocolate now again they're going to put out a top quality chocolate bar and finally whether they'll put out the chocolate drink that the ancient Maya knew about and their predecessors the Olmec and the Aztec we'll have to see it cost money you can get top quality chocolate bars mainly from from France today I don't own any stock in the delrona company but if you want really chocolate that's more than 75 percent cocoa solids you have to go to companies like that this is what the top chefs in New York and San Francisco years when you look on the menu they're not using Hershey's chocolate and they haul the top chefs know what good chocolate is so that's the whole story of this amazing substance it's got a history that's true history as my wife said long ago is much more interesting than all of the garbage that is written about it it's a plant that was a very important part of one of the world's greatest civilizations of pre-columbian Mesoamerican civilization of Mexico and Central America so thanks for your attention I've got some glad to answer some questions yeah you are showing some sacrifices and cially fifty-one that is actually from the Codex Amalia Becky on Oh which is in Florence in Italy it's not from saw growing but sour gone sour gwin's encyclopedia is in 12 volumes it's in nahuatl and Spanish the mayor Becky Anna was done it like shotgun was not in very early colonial times in Mexico City probably in the late 15th century late 16th century I showed that because first of all to show the to talk about the relationship that the Aztecs had between blood and it looks like what and allegation no that's a that's in nahuatl we have Nahuatl poetry about the relationship between cacao and blood and as a matter of fact the cacao pod they probably thought of as a heart heart sacrifice and blood were very important to and it's all through Sargon and through our sources of native no aatul people what is your question that's a statement if you look at my book I have quoted extensively Aztec poetry on this subject that's been translated by Miguel neon for Thea from Nahuatl does anybody else have another question yeah that's a good question if she were to get some Valrhona chocolate and mix it with hot water would you get something the way the Aztecs drank it or the other yes it would be quite unless you get the sweetened chocolate it would be quite there so you'd want to add some spices through it some chili pepper some honey Thank You sunny they had several sweeteners that were not sugar - sugar his old world but yes my wife did this and God that we got wonderful hot chocolate out of that really incredibly good and it's got a kick to it which no coke there's almost practically no no chocolate real chocolate in a cup of cocoa by the way so if you're worried about what my to do you forget it there's so little in it but you get real chocolate the way that lady for instance in the 18th century cane was drinking it that stuff was really powerful the way they drank it in the Spanish Court to where they drank it in the aesthetic for it and it's wonderful what about the nala sauce or chicken and stuff okay that's another excellent friendship morning there's no evidence whatsoever in Sabu encyclopedia where he gives us the name many dishes are described by fathers I are going and we have other sources on a stick receipt there's no evidence that they ever put chocolate in cooking it's a holy substance with the way I would put it would be like using communion wine you know in the kitchen it was like communion wine it was holy and so you did that never happened male which has chocolate in it there are many stories about its invention all from the 17th century and of in Puebla in the city of Puebla and there's two convents in Puebla which both claimed to have where it was invented somebody claimed that one of these stories is that the bishop was going to come and visit and they wanted the nuns wanted to give the bishop it's nothing really good so they had this turkey cooking and whatnot and all the spices were on the shelves including chocolate and all this other stuff and the Shelf broke and fell into the pot and there was a chocolate him and the mall and they tasted it it was delicious so wale was born then there's other rival stories about it sister sawano de la cruz the great Mexican poet is a chichi apparently loved male so but it's 17th century it's long passed through the conquest so it's all these books a is pre-columbian it's not my use of the chocolate in shamanism there's no evidence that chocolate was ever used by any of these people for shamanistic reasons although there's some Aztec poetry that talks about but suggests that some sort of visions came out of it but nobody's ever been able to identify any kind of a loose enough Ettore substance in chocolate and I don't know I think they might have added something like mushrooms to it or something of that sort this is because they did put all kinds of things in it we knew they took the mushrooms especially the merchants during their feast took both mushrooms and they also drank chocolate and they may have done them both together and we know that they had visions they see whether they were going to get killed on the road in foreign lands and things like this really quite a description inside are going about this but there's we don't know the whole chemistry of chocolate it's just too complicated whether this there's many good books on chocolate actually besides the one we wrote there's there's various books about the button the botany of chocolate and they've been a lot there's a lot of work there's a done on chocolate commercially also a lot of research may be centered in State College Pennsylvania which is near Hershey Pennsylvania but they have a whole Institute of confectionery Sciences is very impressive and they do a lot of work on this yeah I couldn't say everything this afternoon you you're right because it was money Oh mommy a sex animal Hawaiian and whatnot the there were Aztec artisans who were very good at falsified this stuff and they're they're fake chocolate that they could produce which look like chocolate but wasn't they're just sort of empty shells the actual fake chocolate like this has been found archaeologically on the south coast of Guatemala by an archeologist they Fred poke their whole pot of his fake sort of wooden cacao beans and they were very good counterfeiters he asked tanks where when the spaniards introduced coinage it took them about five minutes to learn how to fake Spanish coins it really worried the Spanish crown but they began probably faking cacao beans which shows you how valuable they were however they perceive the sense that the valuable as currency in Cedar Valley that is a very difficult question the way I would imagine that if you drank a had a banquet and drank a whole lot of chocolate it'd be like you know lighting your cigar with a $20 bill because they they it was valuable I mean really I it was it was not consumed it was consumed very sparingly actually by the Aztecs at the ends of banquets probably Baron lbs is wrong when he says they were the Emperor with drinking this all through but the banquet they drank it at the very end and under very very controlled conditions and the women had to stay away from that they couldn't drink the stuff I mean not many people could actually drink it so it was it was like champagne I mean had an inflated price onto it and was not something that was thrown around the place it would appear the equivalent to a very expensive brandy or champagne with us basically well Hakka Java is very good it's delicious but it's it's been heavily Hispanic sized that is it's got sugar in it that's from the old world it's got it's got cinnamon in it ah it's good I mean the things that are added to it but it's not what the way the Aztecs would have had but it's pretty strong chocolate it's good it's it's it's high-quality chocolate there's a lot of cocoa solids in it it's a whole lot better than a cup of cocoa I like it that's correct yeah the Spaniards commercialized cacao very early once they got on through with other ones I decided they liked it especially in the 17th and 18th centuries and it's spread it through the Spanish dominions of a new world wherever it could grow really well Venezuela for instance turned out to be a very good place and they brought the Criollo chocolate from soca lusco in southeastern Mexico they brought the plants to the coast of Venezuela from McGuire all the way down along that Caribbean coast and today top-quality chocolate has produced in that that region choco latte El Rey it's a very very good chocolate that's used by a lot of chefs comes from that area that is that's a top quality chocolate it's the best chocolate is Criollo chocolate yes please No prefer cacao yo check out the cacao tree the umbrella cacao is subject to all kinds of diseases through witch's broom you know various fungus diseases and so forth it attack it and this has been a big problem in big commercial cacao plantations in Africa and elsewhere the problem is that people have dispensed with the old National American way of growing this stuff in a sort of a messy jungle and cut all the forests down and I had kind of monoculture of this stuff well in the first place it doesn't pollinate very well because you've taken away the the environment the midges like is like a messy tropical forest floor so once you've done that it's not going to get pollinated the way it ought to they have problems with with with pollination with with getting the cacao fruit to grow and then it gets much more subject to diseases it's all so they're using clones and spraying this stuff with clones so it's it's genetically to uniform and this is a disaster it's a fault of the growers they asked for it and then they they get it if they go back to planning and having in a tropical forest environment sort of a artificial but net the same kind of messy shaded environment they'd be doing a whole lot better this has been pointed out by the number of botanists as a big problem yes well the way it grows today inmates of America's capacity to go to Tabasco Ranvir more so you see a lot of it drawn there and it's shaded that's very good quality attractiveness for their sample in pre-columbian times they they in pre-columbian times they were they always would have grown it in the forest as the way it naturally grows what they they they would they would they would tended they were cultivated they were transplanted but always with the mother day that got cow over it the shade trees and whatnot to keep this this kind of jungly environment that's the way they did it and they were very very successful at it white chocolate isn't chocolate it's a misnomer as a matter of fact I think the US Department of Agriculture is going after people are calling it the chocolate there's a lot of litigation about that that is the cocoa butter that's the fact that they extract it's largely cocoa butter that they've taken out of the chocolate and then they add sugar to it and vanilla baby and call it white chocolate but it's technically not chocolate it's a byproduct of chocolate you

Channel: UC Berkeley Graduate Division

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Keywords: Coe, Hitchcock, 23336, 10/10/2000

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Length: 82min 5sec (4925 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2012

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Coe is the Charles J. MacCurdy Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus at Yale University. He is recognized for his work in the field of the ethnohistory of Mesoamerica, the historical archaeology of northeastern United States, and writing systems. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Mexican Society of Anthropology. Born in New York in 1929, Coe received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1959. He began his academic career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee (1958-1960), after which he joined the Yale University faculty. Coe has authored numerous world-renowned books on Mesoamerica including Breaking the Maya Code (1992). This book constitutes an informed account of one of the most exciting adventures of our age, the extraordinary breakthrough in deciphering the inscribed remains of Mayan monuments. Coe's other works include The Maya (1966), America's First Civilization: Discovering the Olmec (1968), and The True History of Chocolate (1996).