ArcheoProductions, Inc. develops and produces anthropology-related educational and entertainment projects in a variety of media.

Documentary Films

Our first series of films focuses on four ritual foods of the Americas, chocolate, tequila, corn, and potatoes. These films take the viewer on highly visual adventures aboard a vehicle that unites all humankind throughout time: our obsessions with our favorite foods. Each one-hour journey will depict our own present-day food obsessions and showing parallels between ancient and contemporary food rituals of these four culturally fascinating foods. Some of the most stunning places on earth are visited — the Altiplano of the Andes, the Central American rain forest, and our own desert Southwest. We explore the ancient cultures of the Americas and show how their seemingly bizarre food-related rites are not so distant from our own.

The first documentary of this series, Chocolate: Pathway to the Gods, has just been completed in the spring of 2005.

Books

Our books take the reader deeper into the Mesoamerican world of ritual and ceremony.

Our first book, Heart and Soul: Chocolate in Mesoamerica, is a cohesive examination of chocolate as a sacred food from Preclassic to contemporary times in Mesoamerica. We pull the reader through a metaphorical journey to reveal the sacred bond between cacao, humans, and the gods, while exposing chocolate's link to fundamental concepts of creation, fertility, death and rebirth. Its transition from a sacred food to an economic commodity takes chocolate into the heart of modern rainforest ecological issues, prompting a relook at ancient formulas for biodiversity during a time when chocolate was sacred.

It will be published by University of Arizona Press in 2006.