In August 1896, members of the Hyde Exploring Expedition began excavating a room (numbered 28) in the northern part of Pueblo Bonito, the largest and fanciest great house in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, home to the largest assemblage of monumental buildings in the prehistoric Southwest. Over the next couple of weeks they discovered 174 whole vessels, most of which were decorated in the style of black-on-white Chaco ceramics, though others had no surviving decorations. Of these, 112 were jars in the shapes of cylinders that range from about five to fifteen inches tall, with a diameter of from three to six inches. These cylinder jars are only found in Chaco culture sites, and more than half of them have come from Room 28.
In 2009, editor Patricia Crown and nutritional chemist Jeff Hurst discovered residues of chocolate absorbed into cylinder jars from Pueblo Bonito. Chocolate comes from cacao beans that in turn come from a tropical tree that only grows 1,200 or more miles south of Chaco Canyon. Chocolate was an important ceremonial and elite drink in Mesoamerica, but until then, it was unknown north of Mexico.
In 2013, Crown obtained permission from the National Park Service to reopen and excavate Room 28. Crown, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico, and a team of six students spent twenty-three days working in Room 28. There they found out much about the room, as well as the numerous artifacts left behind by the earlier excavators. The field work was augmented by visits to the collections of earlier excavations now housed in New York and Washington, D.C. museums.
This volume is the story of this research project into one of the most fascinating aspects of Chaco Canyon. A much debated topic of Chaco culture archaeology involves the connection (or lack thereof) between Chaco Canyon and Mesoamerica. The presence of quantities of chocolate in unique vessels in Pueblo Bonito seals the case for a strong connection. Yet many questions remain. Why were so many vessels left in one room that was burned near the time of Chaco’s collapse around A.D. 1130? Why were cylinder jars never made again? Much of Chaco culture remains a conundrum. This fascinating volume answers many questions, but raises many new ones. The enigma remains.
