Traders brought Central American cacao to Georgia 1,000 years ago

Mass spectrometry revealed that the broken containers had once held something containing the chemical compounds theobromine, theophylline, caffeine, and paraxanthine. Those compounds are hallmarks of cacao, but they’re also found in yaupon holly, which grows all over the eastern US. Indigenous people in the region have used yaupon holly in tea since well before the rise of Etowah (and someone is probably drinking some right now). Based on the biomarkers, there was no real reason to look for imported cacao instead of local yaupon tea. But King and his colleagues decided to anyway, and they found cacao DNA. It’s the first evidence that Etowah, and the Mississippian culture, had trade connections stretching all the way to the Maya world. That’s revelatory enough, but since the potsherds date to the construction of Etowah’s first platform mound, the results mean that Etowah had long-range trade networks even in its early days. So far, we know that Chaco Canyon had its own trading network reaching through Mexico and south into Central America. What we don’t know is whether Etowah got its cacao through a network traveling north through Mexico, or if its Central American connection actually ran through Chaco Canyon—or both. “These results ask us to look more closely for evidence of links connecting the Mississippian world to the Hohokam and Ancestral Pueblo of the Southwest,” wrote King and his colleagues. Meanwhile, between 800 and 1600 CE, southwestern cultures like the Ancestral Pueblo had connections with the Caddoan cultures who lived west of Etowah, in what’s now Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas. Their archaeological sites contain turquoise, southwestern-style pottery, and obsidian from hundreds of kilometers to the west. All of these networks connecting far-flung Indigenous civilizations would have “moved things, people, and ideas,” as King and his colleagues put it. It’s very tempting—and very plausible—to envision a complex web of traditional relationships spanning much of the continent in the millennium before European colonial powers arrived to wreck it all. But mapping out who was trading with whom is another, and much more complicated, puzzle entirely, one that is going to require a lot more archaeological evidence. “Early in the history of Mississippian studies, it was common to attribute the complexity of Mississippian lifeways to connections with Central America,” wrote King and his colleagues. “This line of explanation was eventually abandoned for lack of supporting evidence and because of the implication that Indigenous people of the Eastern Woodlands were not capable of creating a complex civilization. As new evidence comes to light, it will become time to explore those connections, but this time without denying the achievements of Mississippian people.” PLOS ONE, 2026. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0353607. (About DOIs).