Cacao as money
Cacao beans really were used in exchange and tribute across Mesoamerica, and the tidy version — a currency with a published price list — is a modern reading of a small number of colonial-era sources. What kind of money it was is the genuinely open question.
What is disputed
Three separate things are routinely conflated. THAT cacao was used in exchange is well attested and not in dispute. WHAT the exchange rates were rests on a small number of post-conquest Spanish sources whose figures are frequently quoted as though they were a published tariff; they are not, they disagree with one another, and they describe a disrupted system. WHETHER 'currency' is the correct category is a live scholarly question, because cacao beans are simultaneously a store of value, a unit of account and an edible commodity, and where they sit on that spectrum probably varied by region and period. This catalogue states the first, attributes the second, and declines to settle the third.
The underlying fact is solid. Cacao beans functioned in tribute, in exchange and as a standard of value across parts of Mesoamerica, before and after contact. Tribute records list them; colonial sources record goods being valued in them; and there is no serious doubt that they changed hands in something like the way money does.
The difficulty is what follows. Popular accounts move quickly to specific exchange rates — this many beans for a rabbit, that many for a load of firewood — quoted as though from a price list. Those figures come from a handful of sixteenth-century Spanish sources, written after the conquest, describing a system already disrupted, by observers with limited access and their own frames of reference. They are evidence of something and they are not a tariff table.
There is also a categorical question underneath. Cacao beans are perishable, countable, divisible, hard to counterfeit convincingly, and also edible and desirable in themselves — which puts them somewhere between a commodity used in barter, a standard of account and a currency proper, and different scholars place them differently. The frequently repeated detail that counterfeiters filled empty husks with earth is attested and is itself an argument that the beans were functioning at least partly as tokens rather than purely as goods.
What can be said plainly: cacao carried value, moved through tribute and exchange, and was used to measure the worth of other things. The precise rates, and the question of whether 'currency' is the right word at all, are less settled than the confident retellings suggest.
- Period
- Pre-contact through the colonial period
- Region
- Mesoamerica
- Kind of record
- Contested narrative
Who developed this
The colonial sources that supply almost every quoted exchange rate were written by the administration that had just destroyed the system being described. Using them is unavoidable; treating them as neutral fiscal documentation is not.
Significance
It is the single most repeated fact about ancient cacao, and the gap between what is attested and what is asserted is unusually wide.
Related
History and culture
- Cacao among the MexicaThe tribute system in which cacao's exchange role is best documented.
- The invention storiesThe wider pattern this belongs to — chocolate history's tidiest claims being its least secure.
- Cacao among the MayaThe earlier tradition in which cacao also moved through exchange and tribute.
Sources
- Codex Mendoza — Colonial Mexico, c. 1541; Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1541(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)
- The True History of Chocolate — Thames & Hudson(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)