Under the influence of phenomenological approaches, a semiotic perspective on the body is being replaced in archaeology by analysis of the production and experience of lived bodies in the past through the juxtaposition of traces of body practices, idealized representations, and evidence of the effects of habitual gestures, postures, and consumption practices on the corporal body. On the basis of a shared assumption that social understandings of the body were created and reproduced through associations with material culture, archaeology of the body has proceeded from two theoretical positions: the body as the scene of display and the body as artifact. Today, the body as a site of lived experience, a social body, and site of embodied agency, is replacing prior static conceptions of an archaeology of the body as a public, legible surface.

Chemical analyses of residues extracted from pottery vessels from Puerto Escondido in what is now Honduras show that cacao beverages were being made there before 1000 B.C., extending the confirmed use of cacao back at least 500 years. The famous chocolate beverage served on special occasions in later times in Mesoamerica, especially by elites, was made from cacao seeds. The earliest cacao beverages consumed at Puerto Escondido were likely produced by fermenting the sweet pulp surrounding the seeds.archaeology ͉ chemistry ͉ Honduras ͉ Mesoamerica

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We argue that since agency and structure are indivisible parts of a single process through which society is continuously created over time, everything that persists or changes in archaeological sites is evidence of agency. The challenge is to adopt appropriate descriptive levels and language to avoid falsely dividing agency and structure. Successful archaeological studies use networks and chains as models or metaphors for connections in sequences of action over time. We argue that models must also link micro-scale actions to outcomes on the macroscale. Because theories of agency differ in the degree of freedom of action they assume, archaeologists must also clearly identify their own position with respect to constraints on action.We suggest that whenever archaeologists manage to do analyses of agency right, we are simultaneously talking about agency and structure, since these are not alternatives, but inseparable parts of a single process (Giddens, 1979, pp. 53, 69-70). Moore (2000) suggested that archaeologists think about structure and agency dialectically. While forcing us to keep agency and structure linked, in practice this still risks allowing us artificially to separate structure (interpreted as institutions) from agency (interpreted as action). It risks our envisioning the past as an alternation of moments of the exercise of agency in an otherwise continuous flow of structure.Our position is that structure and agency do not alternate. Structured agency is exercised in sequences of practices that recapitulate and transform prior actions, sequences that we can recognize as structures at scales from the individual technical practice to the collective coordinated experience of long-enduring landscapes. Structuration is simultaneously the exercise of agency and the constitution