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Chocolá: An Ancient Maya Capital in a Contemporary Guatemalan Community 

Review by Gavin Roger Davies 

 

Water, Cacao, and the Early Maya of Chocolá  

By Jonathan Kaplan and Federico Paredes Umana 

University Press of Florida, 2018 
 

 

Water, Cacao, and the Early Maya of Chocolá presents the results of Jonathan Kaplan and Federico 

Paredes Umana’s three seasons of archaeological investigations and additional years of research at the 

large prehispanic site of Chocolá, located in the Pacific piedmont of southwestern Guatemala. More 

than simply a dry monograph, this book also represents the culmination of Kaplan’s journey as the 

director of a project that was ultimately shut down by the modern community in which they were 

working. As Kaplan reveals in the Preface: 

“Our research was halted by threats from Christian evangelical pastors and wealthier families in 

the town wishing to build bigger churches and homes, destroying mounds containing ancient 

edifices. They saw the archaeological project, with its mandate from the Cultural Ministry to 

protect the mounds, and the Guatemalan cultural patrimony protection laws themselves, as 

impediments to their ambitions” (xxii) 

  Given the problems that Kaplan’s project precipitated in the local community, it is unlikely that 

archaeologists will be granted further access to these ruins anytime soon. For this reason, and due to the 

rapid rate of development occurring in that region, Kaplan laments that: “the record of our work may 

be all that remains for posterity and world cultural patrimony”. That this responsibility weighs heavy 

on Kaplan is evident both from such explicit statements and also by the exhaustive level of detail 

provided in both the background and results chapters of this book.  



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 The site of Chocolá was one of several sites that rose to importance in southern Mesoamerica 

during Middle and Late Preclassic periods (c.600 BC – 300 AD). One of just nine sites in the region to 

have produced a ruler portrait (Monument 1), Kaplan reports that the site once boasted over 100 

mounds, indicating that the population of the site may have rivalled that of better known Preclassic 

sites like Takalik Abaj (in the Department of Retalhuleu) and Kaminaljuyu (in the Valley of 

Guatemala). 

 Chocolá’s location, in one of the premier cacao producing regions has long suggested to 

scholars that cacao may have been central to this center’s political and economic power. However, 

specific evidence tying this ancient site to cacao production has so far been lacking. Kaplan’s discovery 

of a sophisticated hydraulic system running through a large portion of the site and his identification of 

cacao residues in Preclassic pots, thus provides significant support for this theory and helps advance 

our understanding of the Preclassic economy of this region. 

 The first three chapters of Kaplan’s book provide the historical and environmental context of 

the site and include a comprehensive review of previous investigations, and a thorough synthesis of the 

historical documentation for cacao production in the Province and later Department of Suchitepequez. 

The 70-page introductory chapter additionally provides an insightful discussion of the Southern Maya 

Region in the history of Maya scholarship, and perceptions of this region’s role in the development of 

“Maya civilization”.  

 This latter topic has received increasing attention in recent years, in part as a result of Inomata 

et al. (2014) proposed revisions for the Preclassic chronology of the site of Kaminaljuyu, the largest 

and most important site in the Southern Maya Region. The proposed revisions, which would involve 

shifting the preclassic chronology of Kaminaljuyu and several related sites forward by as much as 300 

years, are significant because they suggest that key features of later Classic Maya civilization. (i.e. the 

Long-Count Calendar and the stela-altar complex), which were long believed to have emerged first in 

the Southern Maya Region and then spread north to the Peten region, may have emerged 

contemporaneously in both regions. As Kaplan and others (e.g. Love 2018) have observed, however, 

diffusion is too simplistic a concept to explain the processes involved in the spread and adoption of 

“Maya” ideology and culture. Kaplan, nevertheless lays out compelling evidence that many of these 

Classic Maya traits were in use during the Late Preclassic in the Pacific Coast.  



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 The first three chapters include numerous high-quality maps and illustrations, which help to 

provide the reader with a clear understanding of Chocolá’s geographical and environmental setting. 

Some of these maps (e.g. Figure 2.6), also highlight the challenge of reconstructing the history of this 

region (particularly in the Department of Suchitepequez) due to the patchy nature of previous work. 

One of these (Figure 2.6) for instance, shows that the area around Chocolá both to the south, east and 

west is still virtually unknown archaeologically. This makes it difficult to put Chocolá in its local 

historical context and to determine the extent of its political territory, which is assumed to have been 

extensive. Greater knowledge of sites in the surrounding region would greatly enrich our understanding 

of Chocolá’s role as a political and administrative center. It is of course quite possible that urbanization 

at the site of Chocolá caused the majority of the rural population to move to that site. If this was the 

case, however, further research will be needed to determine how the leaders of Chocolá provided 

sufficient food for this population, when many of the city’s inhabitants must have been dedicated to 

cacao production.   

 Chapters 4 through 6 of the book provide the hard data derived from Kaplan and Paredes 

Umana’s extensive fieldwork and artifact analysis. These chapters are rich in detail and may prove 

difficult for non-specialists to digest. However, the quantity and quality of the illustrations help to 

make these chapters more accessible. Patience and perseverance with these chapters, is rewarded by a 

greater understanding of how the site’s architecture and artifacts compare with those of nearby sites 

like Takalik Abaj and Kaminaljuyu.  

 For those who have followed Kaplan and Paredes Umana’s previous reports and publications, 

little in these chapters will be new. An exception to this, however, is the ceramics chapter, which 

provides a more comprehensive listing of the ceramic types and wares than has previously been 

published and includes a large number of digitally produced illustrations. Given the time that has 

passed since the investigations took place, it is somewhat disappointing to find that the ceramic 

analysis is still “ongoing” and also to find that no quantification is provided for any of the ceramic 

types and wares that are described. This makes it difficult to assess changes in the population of the site 

over time as well as changes in the site’s interactions with other sites and regions.  

 Chapter 7 represents the synthesis / discussion section of the book and focuses in on the two 

central themes: water management and cacao production. Although not fully adopting Wittfogel’s 

hydraulic theory, Kaplan nevertheless supports the notion of a “causal link between water control and a 



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centralized source of political authority” and provides persuasive evidence that water management was 

central to Chocolá’s success as an urban settlement and as an early cacao production center. 

 Kaplan and Paredes Umana’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on the rise of 

complex societies on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala. The comprehensive review chapters will make it 

a useful reference source for both students and professional researchers working in the Southern Maya 

Region, while the detailed methodological discussions will make it of general interest for 

archaeologists working elsewhere in the world. Finally, the revelations concerning the problems that 

this project experienced with the local community mean that the book also provides an important 

cautionary tale for archaeologists engaging in research in small, indigenous communities.  

References  

Inomata, Takeshi, et al. (2014) “Chronological revision of Preclassic Kaminaljuyú, Guatemala: 

implications for social processes in the Southern Maya Area”. Latin American Antiquity 25(4):377-408. 

Love, Michael (2018) “Kaminaljuyu Chronology and Ceramic Analysis: An Alternative View”. Latin 

American Antiquity 29(2):260-278.  

 

Gavin Roger Davies is a PhD Candidate within the anthropology department at the University of 

Kentucky, specializing in anthropological archaeology. His PhD research focuses on community 

resilience and political integration during the Classic to Postclassic transition in the Lake Atitlan Basin 

of highland Guatemala. His interests, however, span the much broader region of Mesoamerica and 

extend from the Preclassic to Colonial periods. 

 

 

 

     © 2018 Gavin Roger Davies  


