This Find Will Change Ancient American History

For a very long time, there were certain lines in American archaeology that you were not supposed to cross. Not physical lines. These are intellectual lines. And you could talk about the trade in the Southeast, and you could talk about exchange in the Southwest. You could talk about Mesoamerica as its own world. But the further you tried to connect those regions to one another, the more dangerous the argument became. And if you started suggesting substantial interaction between Mesoamerica and the people living farther north, especially in the eastern United States, you were stepping into territory that archaeology had spent generations trying to shut down. A few years ago, researchers working in Etowah, Georgia, thought they had found something that had crossed that line. They had evidence, just not enough of it. So they backed away. And now, they have gone back to the same pottery with a completely different kind of test. And this time, they got an answer. And what they found does not just reopen an old argument about Etowah. It adds another link to a chain of evidence that has been building across ancient North America for years. And that chain is pulling one of archaeology's oldest ideas apart. Etowah is in northwestern Georgia on the Etowah River. By the 14th century, it would become one of the most important centers in the Mississippian world. But the material at the center of this new study comes from much earlier, from the period when people were first building the site's monumental core. The pottery was recovered from the large pits dug during construction of Etowah's first platform mound. Those pits were later filled with debris from communal feasting, broken ceramics, animal remains, and other materials associated with the events surrounding that mound's construction. The deposits date to the 11th and 12th centuries, and the timing may be one of the most important parts of that find. The cacao is not showing up after Etowah had already become a major Mississippian center. It is there during the initial construction of that first platform mound. And that means that the long distant connection was already present while Etowah was being built. So what we may be looking at is not a city that developed in isolation and later joined a larger network. We may be looking at the spread of a network that was already functioning across ancient North America. Etowah did not become connected later. It appears to have been born connected. Researchers had actually looked at some of this pottery before. More than a decade ago, they tested residues absorbed into the ceramics that they found compounds associated with caffeinated drinks. At first, cacao was one possibility. Then the whole thing became muddy. And the problem was Yapon holly. Yapon grows in the southeast and was used to make the highly caffeinated drink that Europeans later called the black drink. The chemical markers being used to identify cacao were not as exclusive as researchers had once thought. And Yapon could produce many of those same compounds. So in 2017, the Etowah team backed away from it being cacao. They concluded that the residue was more likely Yapon. And scientifically, that was where the evidence just stood. The chemistry could tell them that people at Etowah were consuming a caffeinated drink. It could not tell them which plant produced that drink. And this new study, it changes that. Researchers went back to three of Etowah's samples that had produced the strongest earlier chemical results. And this time, they did not look for chemical markers. They looked for DNA. And two of the three samples contained specific DNA sequences from the broma cacao. The genetic fragments were highly degraded, which is what you would expect from ancient DNA. And the researchers used laboratory controls and bioinformatic filtering to rule out modern contamination and sequences that might belong to other types of plants. The cacao remained. So the question that had been sitting there for nearly a decade finally had an answer. Cacao was at Etowah. And it was there around the same time cacao was being consumed at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. That was confirmed back in 2009, when cacao residues were identified in unusual cylinder jars from Pueblo Benito. Chaco already had other materials that were pointing to a southern connection. Scarlet macaws had been transported there alive. Copper bells of Mexican form appeared in the southwest. Southwestern turquoise moved into Mexico, and marine shell crossed hundreds of miles of the desert. Cacao joined an archaeological record that was already showing movement across those extraordinary distances. Now cacao turns up a thousand miles to the east, in Georgia, inside the Mississippian world. Etowah was already part of a huge interconnected system that was stretching across eastern North America. Copper from the Great Lakes moved south, and marine shell from the Gulf and Atlantic moved deep inland. Prestige goods, ceremonial objects, and shared imagery traveled between major Mississippian centers over enormous distances. Cahokia, Moundville, Etowah, Spiro, and many other centers were not just isolated experiments that were scattered across the landscape. They were connected parts of a much larger world. We already knew that. What this new find does is push another connection farther south. And at some point, you have to stop calling every new connection an exception. And that is where the old dogma starts to fall apart. To understand how archaeology got itself into this position, you have to go back to the late 19th century in the Smithsonian Institution. In 1879, the Smithsonian became home to the Bureau of Ethnology under John Wesley Powell. A few years later, the Bureau created a major program specifically to investigate the ancient mounds spread across eastern North America. At the time, one of the biggest questions in American archaeology was who had built them. A popular answer was that Native Americans had not. People invented a vanished race of mound builders, supposedly more advanced than the native peoples that Europeans encountered later. And depending on who was telling the story, these mysterious builders might be Egyptians or Phoenicians, Hebrews, Europeans, or some other conveniently non-native population. The Smithsonian Mounds investigation eventually killed that idea. Cirrus Thomas and the Bureau of Ethnology spent years excavating and comparing sites, and in 1894, Thomas published his massive report concluding that the mounds had been built by Native Americans. But there was another reason later Europeans had so much trouble imagining that the Native people they saw could be descendants of the people who had built cities like Cahokia. They were not looking at those societies at their height. They were looking at what remained after catastrophe. Cahokia itself had been abandoned centuries before European colonization reached the Mississippi Valley, so the epidemics did not cause Cahokia to fall. But across the Americas after 1492, disease, warfare, enslavement, and famine tore through indigenous populations at a staggering scale. Diseases could travel far ahead of the Europeans themselves. A community could be devastated by an epidemic before the people who would later settle its land ever arrived. And millions died before the bulk of European settlers ever set foot across large parts of the continent. By the time the Europeans pushed inland in force, many of the societies they encountered had already been shattered, displaced, reorganized, and combined with other surviving communities. And they were looking at the remnants of a world that had already undergone a demographic catastrophe. Then they looked at enormous abandoned mound complexes and decided that the people in front of them could not possibly have built those. They were comparing the survivors of a catastrophe with civilizations that had existed centuries earlier at their height. And from that mistake came the search for somebody else to build those mounds. The Smithsonian eventually corrected that part of the story. Native Americans built them. The problem came with what happened next. As American archaeology professionalized, it became increasingly hostile to diffusionist explanations. And there was no reason for that hostility. Diffusionism had been used for decades to take Native achievements away from Native people. But the rejection of bad diffusionist fantasies hardened into something much broader. By the middle of the 12th century, diffusionism had become a loaded word. In 1966, John Howland Rowe published an article in American Antiquity calling doctrinaire diffusionism a menace to sound archaeological theory. And that tells you something about the climate. This was not some fringe newsletter. This was American Antiquity in the flagship journal of American archaeology at the time. The pendulum had swung from inventing foreign civilizations to explain Native accomplishments to treating broad claims of cultural diffusion as intellectually dangerous. And those two things are not the same. Saying Native Americans built Cahokia, Chaco, Etowah, and other great centers of this continent does not mean they built them in isolation from one another. The regional divisions became incredibly powerful. And the southwest was studied as the southwest. The southeast was studied as the southeast. And Mesoamerica was placed below another line somewhere. Those categories were useful for organizing research. But over time, they began functioning like walls. And connections inside those regions were expected. Connections across too many of those walls were suspect. And the farther south the connection went, the more uncomfortable things became. That is why Cacao at Etowah matters. It crosses one of those walls with DNA. The researchers who published the new paper point out that there has been very little direct material evidence connecting Mississippian places like Etowah with Central America. They also point out that there has been very little direct evidence tying the eastern woodlands to southwestern societies already known to have those southern connections. The gap in the archaeological record is exactly what made Cacao and Georgia so difficult to imagine for archaeologists. Now it is there. And for about the last year, I've been following one discovery after another on this channel that keeps doing that same thing. Taking places we were taught to see as separate, and putting the connections back together. Better tools are making those old divisions harder to maintain, because they can reveal movement and relationships the old categories obscured. At Etowah, ancient plant DNA just settled a question that chemistry could not. And the old tests had probably Yapon, and the new tests found Cacao. And the importance of that result is not confined to those three vessels. The original chemical work tested 31 pottery samples. 21 contained at least two of the compounds associated with Cacao and Yapon, and three contained all four compounds that the researchers were looking for. Those three were selected for new DNA work. Two came back positive for that Cacao, and that does not mean all the other Etowah vessels had that Cacao too. It means the old assumption that the ambiguous chemistry was probably simply Yapon can no longer settle the question, because now we know Cacao was really there. And that puts several older finds back on the table. Researchers have already detected similar caffeinated residues in Cahokia and other sites in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. And those results become difficult to interpret for exactly the same reason the original Etowah results did. Yapon and Cacao, they overlap chemically. The authors of the new paper specifically point to those older samples as new candidates for ancient DNA testing. And right now we can definitely say that Cacao was in Etowah, and if it turns up in Cahokia or repeatedly through the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, Etowah stops looking like this strange endpoint. We start seeing the distribution, and once you can see the distribution, you can start reconstructing the system behind it. The regions were parts of one vast interconnected civilization. Cacao is especially revealing because it is not a necessity. People valued it enough to move it far outside the environment where it could be grown. And at Etowah, it is present in deposits associated with communal gatherings during construction of that first platform mound. And we still do not know where this particular Cacao was grown or how it reached Etowah. The DNA cannot tell us that. What it can tell us is that it got there. A tropical plant was present at a Mississippian mound center in northern Georgia roughly a thousand years ago, and almost the same time Cacao was present in Chaco Canyon. The old model survived by treating each cross-regional connection as unusual enough to stand by itself. The exceptions keep accumulating. The Smithsonian helped bury the fantasy that some banished superior race had built Native Americans great mound cities. Now another idea is being buried with it. The idea that those cities and civilizations can be understood as isolated regional worlds. The people who built them lived in a world larger than the categories archaeology later placed around them. And the next piece may be already sitting in a museum collection somewhere. And if the Etowah researchers are right, older samples from Cahokia, the Ohio Valley, and the Mississippi Valley, they deserve to be tested again. And if Cacao starts turning up across the water Mississippian landscape, the question changes. And it's no longer why Cacao somehow appeared at one site in Georgia. It becomes how large the system moving it actually was. And for decades, that was the kind of question that archaeology was reluctant to ask. And now the evidence is telling us. Cacao, it was at Etowah. Another link in the chain of proof. And another piece of the old dogma gone. I'm Christine. I'm an anthropologist. And thank you for watching Our Forgotten Past.