Chocolate and Maya civilization go hand in hand. We know that over 2,500 years ago in the Maya lowlands, the Maya were already making the chocolate drink from cacao seeds. Circumstantial evidence suggests that even earlier -perhaps as early as 1200 BC- the Olmec of the Mexican Gulf Coast had discovered the complex processs by which cacao seeds could be processed into chocolate.

It was the great eighteenth century Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, who named the tree from which the seeds are obtained Theobroma cacao - Theobroma, Greek for "food of the gods" and cacao, from the word used throughout Mesoamerica for chocolate. This is a plant that can only grow in tropical lowlands where frost never arrives. In Pre-Columbian times the finest cacao came from Soconusco, the Pacific coastal plain of Chiapas (Soconusco) and neighboring Guatemala. When the Aztec established their empire, they developed a taste for chocolate which they were unable to grow in the highlands, so they sent their armies to conquer Soconusco. But chocolate was grown throughout the Maya lowlands, including the Petén and Yucatan.

Among both Mayas and Aztecs, chocolate was an elite, prestigious drink, reserved to royalty, nobility, long-distance merchants, and high-ranking warriors. By AD 450, large numbers of magnificent vessels filled with the chocolate drink were placed in the tombs of Maya kings; these were inscribed with hieroglyphic texts that describe the particular flavor of chocolate being served. In fact, practically all of the painted or carved cylindrical vessels from Classic Maya burials were containers for chocolate. Beyond its function as a funerary offering, ethnohistoric documents and ethnology tell us that among the ancient and colonial Maya chocolate was served during the negotiation and celebration of marriages.

But cacao had one other function in early Mesoamerica, and that was as money. We know that for the Aztec and Maya on the eve of the Conquest, cacao beans served as currency in market transactions, so that this was a time "when the money grew on trees," as the saying goes.

There are many myths about the transmission of chocolate to the Old World after 1492, but most of them are wrong. Neither Columbus nor Hernán Cortés had anything to do with it. Rather, it was a delegation of Kekchi Maya nobles from Alta Verapaz who introduced this wonderful drink to the Spanish court. But Spaniards and other Europeans never took to it until it was heavily sweetened with sugar, which they had brought from the Mediterranean to Mesoamerica.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century in both the Old World and the New, chocolate remained an elite drink, too expensive for ordinary folk to enjoy, and often forbidden to them. But the invention by a Dutchman of a method to extract the fat in cacao paste led to the mutation of chocolate from drink into a solid confection that could be enjoyed by the masses. Chocolate now became "big business." and the cultivation of the cacao tree was spread all across the globe.

The present exhibit brings together many lovely objects that celebrate the mysteries and rituals that surrounded the chocolate drink among the early Maya, as well as the vessels that were made in colonial times so that a new, Creole elite could indulge their new-found taste for this prestigious beverage.