Uncorked
Archaeology Now has lined up another flight of fun and informative short takes, this time on the history of alcoholic beverages.
Did you think alcohol was too volatile a substance for an archaeological dig? Not so! Under the expert guidance of Dr. Steven Batiuk and Lucas Livingston, archaeologists, hooch historians, and cocktail enthusiasts, we’ll be exploring stories about the history, archaeology, and evolution of beer, wine, and other alcoholic beverages from around the world.
Elle Hugh, courtesy of Pexels.
The history of alcohol is ancient, and it appears that the consumption of alcohol was a common habit in most civilizations. Humans evolved to be able to metabolize alcohol. Genetic studies have shown that our hominid ancestors developed that ability between 7 and 21 million years ago. One could say that we were quite literally bred to drink!
Exactly When was Alcohol Developed?
Probably, the emergence of alcohol coincided with the periods of intensive food collecting by our early ancestors. More importantly, it would have coincided with the first experimentations with a technology we take for granted—storage. Crude vessels made of stone, wood, or plaster would have contained and concentrated the material for the natural fermentation processes to have taken place. They would have been in the later part of the Epipaleolithic about 12000 BP and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period from 10000 to 7000 BCE. It quickly developed from there.
Pottery with re-construction repairs found in Xianrendong cave, dating to 20000–10000 years ago. National Museum of China.
How Did We Learn to Harness the Fermentation Process?
If we look at the written record, we’d be led to believe it was either by accident or divine inspiration. Ancient Persian and Chinese documents tell tales about people accidentally leaving out containers of grapes or grains, which spoiled after being moistened by rain, resulting in this wonderful transformation. Ancient Greek and Sumerian accounts tell us that our skill for crafting drink was a gift from the gods. In more modern times, while gazing across the sprawling vineyards of the French countryside, Ben Franklin penned the famous (and often misquoted) comment that wine is “proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy!”
Now, thanks to the investigations of many inquisitive thinkers like Louis Pasteur, we understand the fermentation process better than ever before. Broadly speaking, we commonly talk about two types of fermentation—alcoholic and non-alcoholic. In an extreme nutshell, alcoholic fermentation is when yeast converts sugar into alcohol. Non-alcoholic fermentation is usually when bacteria converts sugar, carbohydrates, or alcohol into lactic acid or acetic acid. Think of beer and sauerkraut—both are fermented and both go well together but they are very different processes and products.
For our purposes, in this series, we are concentrating on alcohol.
Pexels.
Yeast is all around us, and it has been here long before us. Yeast is a living organism, a microscopic fungus that settles on all surfaces in nature. And if that surface has sugar, like some over-ripe fruit bursting through its skin or a broken beehive with honey diluted by rainwater, then the yeast will turn that sugar into alcohol. So maybe those ancient texts speculating on alcohol’s accidental origins aren’t far off.
Riesling grapes showing Botrytis fungus. Wikimedia Commons.
A truly remarkable cave painting from about 8000 BCE in Spain shows someone harvesting honey from a beehive. We can’t be certain from this picture alone that they fermented the honey into mead, but it shows a concerted effort to cultivate and harvest a readily fermentable sugar 10000 years ago. And then to make alcohol, all it would take would be an accident.
“Woman Gathering Honey.” Watercolor copy by F. Benitez Mellado in the Museum of Prehistory, Valencia, Spain of a Mesolithic (c. 10,000/8000–c. 3000 BCE) painting in the Cueva de la Arana, near Bicorp, Spain.
And if that isn’t early enough for you, we can push it back even further.
Fermentation Through Time and Around the World
Our earliest possible evidence of a fermented, and we hesitate to use the term “beverage” comes from the Reqefet Cave in Mount Carmel, Israel. It is dated to the Epipaleolithic period, approximately 11000 BCE. Analysis of stone mortars that were carved into the floor of the cave suggests evidence of a wheat- and barley-based alcohol that was less beer-like and more a fermented gruel.
Courtesy Dani Nadel, Natufian bedrock mortars in Raqefet Cave, Mount Carmel, Israel, Wikimedia Commons.
At the now famous Pre-Pottery Neolithic A site of Göbekli Tepe near the town of Urfa in Turkey, 1500- to 2000-year-old traces of calcium oxalate, commonly found in beer, have been identified, but not confirmed, in a stone vessel. At the nearby site of Kortik Tepe, stone cups have produced evidence of tartaric acid, suggesting wine might have been part of burial rituals.
Trough-like limestone vessel from Göbekli Tepe, Photo N. Becker, DAI.
The oldest confirmed intentional brew comes from China, from the Neolithic site of Jiahu in the Henan province, dated between 7000-6600 BCE. Although it is best to call this drink a grog, as it is a combination of honey mead, mixed with a beer made from rice and wine made from grape or hawthorn berry. Vessels have been recovered from the area that show a globular jar with a restricted mouth, a short neck, and a large spherical body. Such a vessel form is suitable for storing liquid and is commonly used for fermenting alcoholic beverages, as its narrow neck can be effectively sealed, to exclude as much air as possible and encourage anaerobic conditions.
Courtesy of Z. Juzhong, University of Science and Technology in China and Henan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.
Our work in the Republic of Georgia has confirmed the earliest evidence for making pure, unadulterated wine at the sites of Shulaveris and Gadachrili Gora in the region of Kvemo Kartli, dated to between 6000-5200 BCE.
Early Neolithic jar, circa 6000-5000 BCE, from Khramis Didi-Gora in the Republic of Georgia. Note the probable grape cluster motives encircling the neck. National Museum of Georgia.
When it comes to something we’d recognize as beer, well, that depends on how you split the hair, but we know that a malted barley alcoholic beverage was being brewed en masse across the ancient Mediterranean and ancient Near East well over 5000 years ago, which we will discuss much more in later episodes of Uncorked.
Meketre's Model Brewers. Egypt, Middle Kingdom, 12th Dynasty. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Essentially, alcohol is natural and not the result of a single genius. It was discovered numerous times throughout our history all over the world.
We invite you to be a part of this liquid journey with us over the next few months exploring a topic that has certainly made life a lot more pleasant through the ages!
Stephen Batiuk, PhD
Lucas Livingston
Dr. Stephen Batiuk is Senior Research Associate and Lecturer with the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto, as well as Director of Excavations for the Tayinat Archaeological Project (Turkey) and the Project Manager for the Computational Research on the Ancient Near East (CRANE) Project. He holds his degrees from the University of Toronto (Ph.D.) and the University of Ottawa, and his areas of specialization include Near Eastern archaeology (particularly the Bronze and Irons Ages of Turkey, Syria and the Caucasus), and the origins of viticulture and viniculture.
Lucas Livingston is a nationally recognized leader in the intersections of the arts, museums, cultural accessibility, health, wellness, lifelong learning, and creative aging. In addition Livingston is a specialist in ancient and Asian art, an art museum educator, and creator and host of the Ancient Art Podcast at www.ancientartpodcast.org. He is also a brewer inspired by ancient traditions and Historian of Beer and Curator of Experimental Libations at Morgue Brewing, www.morguebrewing.com, as well as a Chicago Brewseum Board member. He received his Master’s degree in Studies of the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago and was formerly Assistant Director of Accessibility and Lifelong Learning at the Art Institute of Chicago.