cacao (Other Keyword)
1-3 (3 Records)
Pedestal sculptures featuring supernatural felines with cacao drupes projecting from their foreheads dotted the Late Formative landscape of the Pacific slope and adjacent Guatemalan Highlands. In this paper we consider the implications of the replication of this sculptural form, its role in articulating an elite agenda linked to the production of cacao, and its pertinence to sites of varying scale and relative regional authority. A similar suite of meanings engaged with cacao and supernatural...
Investigating Ancient Beverages from Cerro Maya, Belize through Chemical Residue Analysis. (2015)
Ceremonial vessels used by the ancient Maya are common archaeological findings, and are thought to have contained beverages made from cacao, maize and other plants of ritual and economic importance. Increasingly, methods of chemical analysis able to detect trace levels of organic compounds are being applied to the investigation of these artifacts. Two whole pottery vessels from the site of Cerro Maya, Belize were selected from the collection at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the...
Residue Analysis for Cacao in Southeastern Utah Ancestral Puebloan Ceramics, Montezuma Canyon, Utah (2017)
In 2009, theobromine, a biomarker for Theobroma cacao, was found and reported in an analysis of cylindrical vessels from Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (Crown and Hurst 2009). Washburn's positive results from ceramics recovered from Brew's excavations at Alkali Ridge, Utah (Washburn et al. 2013) dating to the Pueblo I period, pushed the time depth of cacao use centuries earlier than the findings from Chaco Canyon. They suggest cacao was brought from the south as a journey food and later used as a food...