By Lauren Burgess
The next time you take a bite out of a Snickers, consider this: in Mayan times, that chocolate bar may have been worth far more than what you paid for it. A study recently published in Economic Anthropology reveals that at the peak of the Mayan civilization, chocolate may have been used as a form of currency.
Like many other early civilizations, the Mayans did not use coins as currency, mostly relying on a bartering system, trading goods like tobacco, clothing, and maize. Cacao beans – the beans that are ground to make chocolate – are also thought to have been used.
To pinpoint an exact time when cacao began to be used as currency, Joanne Baron, an archaeologist with the Bard Early College Network, started analyzing artwork from the Classical Mayan period, from 250 C.E. to about 900 C.E.
While the use of cacao as currency was not depicted in the earliest artwork, Baron found that the idea starting appearing around the 8th century C.E. One of the earliest examples she found was a painted mural from the middle of the 7th century. The mural depicts a pyramid which likely served as a marketplace with a woman offering a man a bowl of Xocoatl-a hot, bitter beverage made by grinding cacao and mixing it with water and spices – in return for dough.
Through her research, Baron found 180 scenes in murals and on ceramics made between 691 C.E. through 900 C.E. that depicted fermented and dried cacao beans being used like coins. In some of these scenes, goods are seen being given to Mayan rulers as a kind of tax. Among these goods were items typically given as tribute like grain, tobacco, and maize, but also woven bags filled with cacao beans. Baron believes that because the Mayan rulers accepted the cacao as payment of taxes, it means that cacao beans had become an accepted form of currency in the Mayan empire.
There are many scholars who are skeptical of this theory. David Freidel, an anthropologist and expert on Mayan civilization at Washington University, believes that because cacao trees were extremely susceptible to crop failure, it is unlikely that cacao was used as money.
He says that just because there was an increase in depictions of cacao in artwork, that does not mean that is served as a form of currency, saying “Is it actually getting more important or are we just learning more about it?”
