Answering the Eternal Questions — With Chocolate

By Kate Rix

For centuries people have paraded their wealth or status before one another, with jewelry or clothing or large houses. It’s the eternal human catwalk: Strut your stuff — literally.

We humans invest so much into our belongings, whether created by us or acquired, because they reflect our inner sense of self, says Rosemary Joyce, who chairs Berkeley’s Anthropology Department. Joyce is particularly interested in ceramics, and focuses on the pots of the Ulua River Valley in northern Honduras, a region largely ignored by scholars until Joyce and her colleagues did their first site survey in the 1970s. These uniquely crafted clay pieces were used in offerings, for cooking, eating, drinking, and even to impress visitors. They are more than functional and beautiful, Joyce says. They’re a window into the way the Mesoamerican culture saw itself and wanted to be seen by others.

“We had pieces of a cylinder in the lab and I tried to reconstruct it,” Joyce recalls of her first undergraduate summer in Honduras 30 years ago. “The picture on it was of a person holding a staff and walking. It was very vivid. He was clearly striding and wearing an enormous white turban, jade beads, and jaguar skin on parts of his costume.”

Cradling that 8th century black cylinder in her hands may have been the moment when the young Cornell University undergraduate decided to study Central America. What better place to ask questions of materialism and identity than a frontier between two well-studied cultures, where conventions are not clear and may not exist at all?

“In pre-industrial societies we used talk about materialism in terms of something like totemism,” Joyce said on a chilly morning outside at the Free Speech Café. “You had things with certain shapes, colors and designs and other people in the community knew how you fit in. But how does that work when you live in an ambiguous place?”

Joyce sensed that in a fertile valley of eight hundred square miles, questions of materialism and identity would involve two things, among others: cacao and ceramics.

On the fringes of the Mayan empire, the Ulua Valley was considered backward and slow in the 1970s, Joyce recalls, yet the place offered an intriguing contradiction: In this valley of 500 farms and towns, there were no clear signs of hierarchy.

“Every farmer in 700 AD had beautiful pots for everyday meals and beautiful figurines used in household level religious practices,” Joyce says. “In this ‘backward’ place everybody had a fairly rich household life.”

With beautiful ceramics and abundant cacao, the area was poised for cultural exchange and trade, Joyce says. And trade they did, though not necessarily in ways social scientists had been trained to notice. While archaeologists knew that household goods were valuable for studying culture, other social scientists at the time felt domestic artifacts weren’t worth studying unless they dated from after the industrial revolution. Joyce recalls realizing that the conventional wisdom might need to be revised.

“It was an inaccurate historical narrative and it certainly didn’t work in Honduras,” she says. While colleagues studying the same time period focused on the ruling classes, Joyce was discovering the treasure of objects used every day by ordinary people. This was a society that had managed to resist the forms of inequality that had made Mayan royal residences far richer in material objects than Mayan peasant households.

With the help of doctoral students, who have contributed to study of the Ulua Valley kiln systems and village designs, Joyce came to see that the valley’s culture was organized into “houses” that shared ethnic or craft identities. The beautiful pots people made in many households were a form of social currency. Rituals knit the house-based culture together — and at the center of many of their ritual ceremonies was another precious local resource: cacao pods.

Using special pots, Ulua residents made frothy fermented drinks like the ones the Aztecs called “green cacao.” Together, the pottery and the cacao formed a decentralized way for many in the valley to trade with outsiders. In many households Joyce and her colleagues have found objects clearly obtained through trade such as sculptures made from Guatemalan jade. What would have been traded in return? Cacao. When visitors arrived, out came the cacao drinks.

“We have a neck fragment with elaborate carvings, red paint, a bulbous body and long neck,” Joyce says. During a big party, the revelers would toss their empty bottles into a pit, smashing them to pieces. “It was a sign of wealth to break the bottles into the feast trash. It was like saying, ‘we can make another one tomorrow.’”

With so many skilled pottery makers and abundant cacao, the Ulua Valley sustained a culture of strong peasantry for some 2000 years. This summer, Joyce heads back to Honduras to look at a much later period: colonial archaeology after 1500 AD. Collaborating with post-doctoral students on a book about the Ulua Valley, Joyce has another book coming out this spring, Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archeology (Thames and Hudson).