The ancient peoples of Mexico and Central America loved to drink chocolate. But their beverage was nothing like the modern one - it was a frothy, bitter brew of fermented, roasted and ground cacao seeds, often spiced with chile peppers, more like mole poblano than Swiss Miss. New archaeological findings by John S. Henderson of Cornell and Rosemary A. Joyce of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues push the date of the first use of cacao back to about 1100 B.C., 500 years earlier than previously known. What’s more, the researchers suggest that this early beverage was something different again - a fermented beer made from cacao pulp, not seeds. Dr. Henderson and Dr. Joyce have been digging for years at Puerto Escondido, a village in the Ulúa Valley in what is now Honduras. They have found elegant pots, cups and other pieces of pottery and have developed a theory that the pottery was probably used on ceremonial occasions to serve cacao beverages. ‘Cacao was the social grease of Mesoamerica,’ Dr. Henderson said. But this theory was based only on circumstantial evidence, he added. ‘We were thinking we didn’t have much potential for chemical confirmation.’ […]