"Chocolate Heaven and Tobacco Saints: Indian Adaptations to Colonialism in Mesoamerica." This lecture was recorded November 23, 2008. Difficult as it is to fathom, prior to Christopher Columbus's first voyage in 1492, no one outside of the Americas had ever seen, much less tasted, tobacco or chocolate. Initially dismissed as dry leaves and an exotic Indian drink, these two ingestibles would eventually permeate European culture and culinary life on a scale unsurpassed by any other New World import. In SACRED GIFTS, PROFANE PLEASURES: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World historian Marcy Norton, Ph.D., traces chocolate and tobacco's pre-Columbian origins and reveals how these two goods became material and symbolic links to the pre-Hispanic past for colonized Indians and colonizing Europeans alike.
Museum of Indian Arts and Culture
http://www.indianartsandculture.org
