The Early and Middle Classic: Chocolate Wars
It may be argued in favor of a greater unity in the Southern Maya Area than the ethnic and linguistic diversity might otherwise indicate simply by virtue of the fact that a “Preclassic collapse” occurred extending through much of the Southern Maya Area . In the Southern Maya Area, in times called Classic for the Maya in the Lowlands to the north, tantalizing evidence exists of an abhorrence of a vacuum in the materially very rich breadbasket of the Area – and, as mentioned, particularly of a continuation of what must have been an extraordinary intensively cultivated commodity of enormous importance in Mesoamerica, and the Maya, in cuisine, ideologically, and even as currency, cacao. In the Guatemalan piedmont, located not more than sixty kilometers east of Chocola, Cotzumalguapa, of Middle Classic trajectory, is renowned for carved stone sculpture intimately associating decapitation and other sacrifice with cacao, associations we must conclude are representative of fierce warfare over this commodity, and copious ethnohistory from early after the Spanish Conquest makes reference to “chiefs” and chiefdoms fighting over production and distribution of the chocolate bean and/or its processed forms.
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