Starbucks of Ancient America?
In the 1600s, Europeans exploring the American southeast wrote of a purification ritual practiced by the native people, involving dancing, vomiting, and large amounts of what the travelers called black drink. Served from shell cups, the highly caffeinated tea was brewed from the shrub Ilex vomitoria, a species of holly. In a new study, researchers have found the first direct evidence of black drink—not in shells from Florida or Mississippi, but in ceramic beakers at the ancient city of Cahokia outside what’s now St. Louis, Missouri. The finding hints at a trade network that flourished centuries before Christopher Columbus landed in the New World, in which caffeinated drinks had Starbucks-like importance and possibly religious significance.
Cahokia sprang up almost overnight around 1050 C.E. and vanished almost as abruptly 300 years later. In the meantime, it was the largest and most sophisticated metropolis north of Mexico. According to archaeological evidence, the central part of the city covered about 14 square kilometers, making it larger than London was then. The 15,000 inhabitants built a wooden version of Stonehenge that charted eclipses; a stockade surrounding the city could be dismantled and rearranged according to an invader’s position. Excavation sites also yielded distinctively patterned, mug-shaped beakers.
Archaeologist Patricia Crown of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and her colleagues were analyzing fragments of these beakers sent by Thomas Emerson and Timothy Pauketat, two archaeologists from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who were working at Cahokia. The beakers contained residues presumed to be chocolate—a prized drink that made its way up from Central America. But although the chemical signatures showed traces of caffeine, they didn’t match up with those of cacao, chocolate’s main ingredient. The Cahokia team wondered whether the beakers had contained black drink instead. Since shell cups like those in the southeast had been found in Cahokia, some archeologists suspected that traders might have brought the purifying brew to the city as well. But because holly leaves don’t survive to be found in archaeological digs, and analytical methods couldn’t distinguish among sources of caffeine, it wasn’t clear just what the Cahokians had been drinking.