Posted on 11/15/2005 6:54:41 PM PST by SJackson
Nov. 15, 2005 — Around a thousand years ago, a group of people gathered in a Peruvian brewery, drank copious amounts of brew, smashed their drinking vessels to the ground and torched the building as part of a complicated abandonment ritual, according to a new study.
The authors of the study in the latest Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences believe the structure was one of the earliest and largest state-sponsored breweries in the Andes.
They also discovered that a group of elite women served as the brewmasters, unusual both for ancient times and even for today.
Remnants of ingredients, fermentation vats and other objects reveal that the women began to produce their beer, called chicha, 10 days before the fiery feasting.
Chicha is a drink that is still made in parts of South America today. The ancient version probably was a spicy and slightly sweet concoction made out of corn and Peruvian pepper tree berries.
Patrick Ryan Williams, one of the study's authors, told Discovery News, "Chicha was thought of as a life-giving liquid. It was offered to the fertility and Earth goddess Pachamama."
Williams, who is curator of anthropology at The Field Museum in Chicago, added, "Women were linked to the earth, the moon and darkness, so perhaps the pre-Incan Wari culture that constructed the brewery associated these attributes with chicha."
Williams and his team found shawl pins only used by elite women, along with pieces of giant clay drinking vessels laying probably where they had been thrown.
The once-powerful Wari were the last group to occupy the site. It is located on the summit of a mesa called Cerro Baúl in what is now the Moquegua Valley sierra of southern Peru. The site is more than 10,000 feet above sea level.
The largest vessels could hold a half gallon of drink. Williams said his team excavated pieces of a set of four, along with other vessels that could hold around 12 ounces of liquid.
The researchers reconstructed the large clay vessels and determined they depicted the "Front-Facing God," which was the paramount deity of the Wari culture. The Wari resided in the central Andes from approximately 600-1,000 A.D.
Since other studies suggest only nobles and leaders drank from chicha vessels decorated with this deity, Williams said it was likely that a line of nobles with allegiance to the Wari king in Ayacucho, Peru, were at the brewery torching.
He explained that the brewery was part of an "embassy-like" complex that included an opulent palace, other residences, craft workshops and an outdoor patio gathering spot. He said the Wari probably wanted a presence near another culture, the Tiwanaku, who also lived in the region.
The brewery burning was part of a ritualistic abandonment ceremony at the site, according to the researchers. This ceremony also led to the torching of the opulent palace, but only after the nobles held a banquet that had deer, seven types of fish, llama or alpaca meat, condor, pygmy owls and flycatchers on the menu.
"The vessels were intentionally smashed," said Williams. "The Wari probably believed the spirits depicted (on) and housed within (the vessels) then moved on to the next world."
In a less symbolic context, destruction of the site also meant that other groups could not benefit from the Wari's architecture, brewing and handiwork.
The archaeologists were able to reconstruct the feast and ceremony by analyzing animal bones, dishware, ash and other finds. They also made chicha according to an old Peruvian recipe.
When fresh it can be a mellow, satisfying drink, but Williams said this version "goes bad and turns into a vinegary liquid" around 4-5 days after it ends its fermentation process.
Because Tiwanaku society appears to have fragmented at around the same time that the Wari outpost was abandoned, Williams theorized, "Since there was no centralized power sitting on the other side of the hill any more, the Wari may have decided to leave."
Previously, the Wari probably traded beer and textiles for fish, meat and other goods provided by the Tiwanaku and other local groups.
Ben Bronson, curator of Asian archaeology at the Field Museum who did not work on the study, told Discovery News that it was uncommon for South American women to be in charge of making alcoholic beverages.
He indicated that men today dominate the practice in the very same region, but some of the workers could be women with an impressive link to the past.
Let me be the first to type, Peruvians ROCK!
I've done that hundreds of times.
Around a thousand years ago, a group of people gathered in a Peruvian brewery, drank copious amounts of brew, smashed their drinking vessels to the ground and torched the building
Here in Oklahoma we don't expect much, but running out of beer is totally unacceptable.
How the heck do they know it was an "abandonment ritual"?? Maybe they all just got plastered and someone tipped over a candle..
Hmmm. No mention of the fact that the "Elite" women
masticate the corn in order to start the fermentation
process.
Mmmmmmm.
There's a great depicition of this in one of the Indiana Jones movies.
"Did I ever tell you about the time Brasky took me out to go get a drink with him? We go off looking for a bar and we can't find one. Finally Brasky takes me to a vacant lot and says, 'Here we are.' We sat there for a year and a half and sure enough someone constructs a bar around us. The day they opened we ordered a shot, drank it, and then burned the place to the ground. Brasky yelled over the roar of the flames, 'Always leave things the way you found em!'"
Must have been the altitude.
Coming some day to a micro brewery somewhere ...
I was wondering what these guys were drinking themselves when they came up with this farfetched idea. Did you ever noitce that to these historians who fabricate these historical events, EVERYTHING is some sort of "religious ritual"? They just had a party of rich people that got out of hand and the fire dept didn't make it in time.
"Elite" women.
"Women with teeth."
Next we need a report that chicha helps protect against some kind of cancer or against heart disease.
Honest, I'm not just drinking beer for myself. I'm a acolyte of Pachamama, that's what. Woohoo!
Heh. You obviously haven't met too many archaeologists. Everything they find, everything, is either a toilet or a temple. Trust me on this one, archaeology is just a tiny bit more of an art than a science.
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