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Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao. Cameron L. McNeil, editor. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2006. xvi and 542 pp., maps, tables, diagrams, photographs, references, list of contributors, and index. $75.00. (ISBN 978-0-8130-2953-8).
As a geographer who has done research on another agricultural commodity of great importance to Latin America - bananas - I read Chocokte in Mesoamerica with great interest. The book is an edited volume with 28 authors; many of the chapters are coauthored. It offers a multi-disciplinary look at one of the region's most significant exports, though that aspect of cacao and chocolate is not the focus of the volume. Instead, it provides the reader with a predominantly historical perspective on the cultivation of cacao, its multiple uses, and its cultural ramifications in Mesoamerica.
The book is logically organized. The twenty chapters that follow the introduction are divided into four parts, the first of which includes four chapters that provide a multi-dimensional background about the cacao plant, its origins, its physical aspects including its chemistry, the processes of its domestication, and its basic archaeological importance.
The parts that follow are arranged chronologically into pre-Columbian, colonial, and post-colonial groupings. Given the preponderance of anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians among the 28 authors, it is not surprising that the pre-Columbian section is the strongest of the three chronological parts. In fact, many of the chapters in the two subsequent sections also focus on pre-Columbian matters in their early pages. Many fewer pages are devoted to colonial and modern aspects of cacao in Mesoamerican societies.
Geographers among the book's readers can gain insights into the methodologies employed by other disciplines, including several outside of the social sciences. Linguistics is among these; such tools as syllable reduction, stress placement, and glottochronology, along with linguistic methods of tracing word origins and their diffusion, are all employed in an effort to...