Experts: Mayans may have used chocolate as spice

Experts have long thought cacao beans and pods were mainly used in pre-Hispanic cultures as a beverage, made either by crushing the beans and mixing them with liquids or fermenting the pulp that surrounds the beans in the pod.

But Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History says that for the first time chocolate traces have been found on fragments of a plate, not a cup, suggesting it was severed with solid foods.