Cocoa and civilisation maya.

Ever wished chocolate grew on trees? Well it does! Cocoa trees grew wild in the Amazon and tropical rain forests of Central and South America for thousands of years – way before it ever reached us in Europe.

Cocoa beans were prized by the Maya Indians as far back as 600 AD. They roasted the beans, and added chilli and other spices to make a drink called ‘xocoatl’. It wasn’t much like our drinking chocolate though.

The Mayan drink ‘xocoatl’ means “Bitter Water.”

Mayan Indians lived in what’s now Southern Mexico, the tropical Yucatan Peninsula. At first they harvested cocoa beans from wild trees in the rainforest. Then they started growing their own trees by clearing bits of the forest – which shows how important cocoa was to them.

They didn’t only drink the cocoa, they used it as currency too. Here’s an idea of what it was worth:

4 cocoa beans could buy a pumpkin
10 could buy a rabbit
100 could buy a slave

And merchants used cocoa beans to trade for cloth, jade and ceremonial feathers. Just think, if someone hadn’t invented coins and notes, you could have been going to the shops with a pocketful of cocoa beans instead!

Like money and jewellery these days, cocoa beans were valuable and were given as gifts at religious ceremonies and other important occasions.

‘Cocoa fruits were used at festivals for Ek Chuah, the merchant god’.

So how did these ancient people get their cocoa beans from one place to another? With no horses, pack animals or wheeled carts in Central America, instead farmers would travel along the rivers by canoe, or strap big baskets to their backs.  Wealthy merchants would employ porters, and could travel further with their cocoa beans – as far as the Aztec kingdom.