This pot is the earliest known vessel in which chocolate was prepared for consumption. It dates from 600BC, a millennium before the previous record-holder. It was collected from Colha, in Belize, and its contents were analysed by a team led by Jeffrey Hurst, a chemist who works for Hershey Foods, an American confectioner, and Terry Powis, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, Austin. The results, published in Nature, show the presence of a chocolate-specific molecule called theobromine. In the 17th-century, at the time of the Spanish conquest, chocolate was prepared by the local Maya by pouring it from pot to pot to foam it up. The spouted shape of the Colha pot suggests this was an ancient practice.