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Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao. Cameron McNeil (ed.). Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2006. xvi + 542 pp.
Cameron McNeil has brought together an impressive array of scholars and generated a multiauthored collection that joyously disproves my lament that "they don't make them like that anymore." The editors of the University Press of Florida are to be congratulated for undertaking a work that is as detailed, inclusive, and truly scholarly as this volume. Perhaps the inherently attractive quality of chocolate helped to convince them that this work would repay their efforts. The result, which garnered the Society for Economic Botany's Mary W. Klinger Book Award in 2008, is outstanding by almost any standard. Individual papers are of high quality, almost all lucidly written, and include excellent cross-referencing of illustrations as well as individual subjects.
McNeil's long introductory chapter offers an effective synthesis. It is followed by 20 other papers by 28 individuals, or combinations of scholars, including McNeil. She groups them into four parts, beginning with four chapters that describe the evolution, domestication, chemistry, and taxonomic identification of cacao (genus Theobroma) and its relatives. These chapters look at chocolate's South American kin, then at Theobroma cacao L in the Neotropics, at the Iaguar Tree, and at the identification of traces of cacao in archaeological samples. The seven chapters of Part II cover various aspects of this product in Pre-Columbian cultures. These range from describing the history of the word "cacao" and...