Arturo Gómez-Pompa Professor of Ecology and Botany in the Faculty of Sciences of the National University in the Institute of Biology at UNAM. These distinctive and academic positions have gained Gómez-Pompa a prestigious reputation in the ecological world. He discovered the use of Theobroma cacao, or the tree of chocolate, as ancient crops in rejolladas and cenotes within the Yucatán Peninsula. This confirmed his hypothesis on the anthropogenic origins of the Mayan forests and advanced future research in the domestication of tropical trees. Gómez-Pompa created a database for the Flora of Veracruz project in the 1960s that is still utilized to this
Theobroma cacao Amelonado, Criollo, Nacional, Contamana, Curaray, Cacao guiana, Iquitos, Marañon, Nanay, and Purús. The generic name is derived from the Greek for "food of the gods"; from θεός ("theos"), meaning "god", and βρῶμα ("broma"), meaning "food". The specific name "cacao" is the Hispanization of the name of the plant in indigenous Mesoamerican languages. The cacao was known as "kakaw" in Tzeltal, K'iche' and Classic Maya; "kagaw" in Sayula Popoluca; and "cacahuatl" in Nahuatl as "bean of the cocoa-tree". "T. cacao" is widely distributed from southeastern Mexico to the Amazon basin. There were originally two hypotheses about its domestication; one said that