Weblogging Considered Harmful

More nifty archaeology: A scientist for Hershey’s explores the Mayan history of theobroma cacao.

The closest I can say is this: take baking chocolate, melt it down, throw it in a blender with hot water, add the spices of your choice—all spice, cinnamon, chilies, maybe agavae syrup to sweeten it, cactus—and whip it up. There’s a lot of information, anecdotally, about what was put in it. Then drink the foam! The Maya drank the foam because when it rose, it was closest to heaven. I say, “take baking chocolate” because it has a fair amount of fat in it. Cacao beans have about 50 percent fat. The Maya would have made a mixture. They harvested and potentially fermented the beans, roasted them, took the shells off, ground them with a metate to get them nice and smooth…again, baking chocolate is the closest thing that I can recommend.

[via someone on LiveJournal, whose original post seems to have evaporated]

My mother sent me an interesting archaeological note this afternoon:

Archaeologists excavating an ancient Roman site in the city of York in northern England believe they have uncovered the world’s best-preserved gladiator graveyard. The 80 skeletons unearthed so far reveal the many gruesome ways a gladiator could perish in the arena…

York is a pretty neat architectural site — I visited the Viking excavation site / exhibit on a trip about a decade ago.