U.N. Adds to List of Cultural Treasures

UNESCO head Koichiro Matsuura, who announced the list of 43 traditions, said he was glad it included developing countries from Africa and elsewhere. Cultural traditions are chosen based upon their risk of disappearing, as well as their cultural value and importance to their communities.

"Despite the vitality and the strength of these cultural expressions," he said at UNESCO's Paris headquarters, "they are many that need urgent and immediate safeguarding."

The list was the third issued by the U.N. organization, and "will probably be the last," a UNESCO statement said. Countries submitted 64 applications this year, which the agency whittled down to 43.

Samba de Roda, from Brazil's Reconcavo de Bahia, originated from slave traditions in the area. It mixes music, dance and poetry into a genre that influenced the development of the urban samba that is today a major part of the South American country's identity.

Colombia's Cultural Space of Palenque de San Basilio grew into a haven of musical and oral traditions, religious festivities and medical practices in a small village southeast of Cartagena, founded as a refuge for escaped slaves in the 17th century.

Also listed was Japanese Kabuki, a highly stylized form of traditional theater, where men play all female roles. In Turkey's whirling dervish ceremonies, skirt-wearing dancers of an ascetic Sufi religious order carry out gentle turns that build toward dynamic spins.

Other honorees included a form of ethnic Berbers' poetry from Algeria; a type of Khmer shadow theater from Cambodia; ox-herding traditions once used by coffee-growers in Costa Rica; Guatemalan drama based on myths about wars between Mayan groups; and orchestral music of Mozambique's Chopi people involving xylophone-like timbala instruments.

The list was created in 2001 to protect popular and traditional culture and now totals a cumulated 90 entries. It complements UNESCO's World Heritage List of precious natural and cultural sites.

Now THIS is culture worth saving, IMHO:

Elite Women Made Beer in Pre-Incan Culture

Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience Managing Editor
LiveScience.com

An ancient brewery from a vanished empire was staffed by elite women who were selected for their beauty or nobility, a new study concludes.

The finding adds to other evidence that women played a more crucial role in ancient Andean societies than history books have stated. It may also in some ways reflect modern drinking traditions in the Andean mountains, where women get drunk as much as men, researchers say.

The brewery, on a mountaintop in southern Peru, cranked out hundreds of gallons of beer every week. The 1,000-year-old facility was part of the Wari empire, which predated the Incas.

The final days

Archeologists have pieced together the last days before the city was evacuated for unknown reasons. A final batch of chicha, as the drink is called, was prepared. A week later, nobility drank the chicha as part of a big feast and ceremony. More than two dozen precious ceramic vessels -- the chicha mugs -- were tossed into embers of a fire and smashed as sacrifices to the gods.

Then the residents mysterious fled.

"Our analyses indicate that this specialty brew was a high-class affair," said Patrick Ryan Williams, Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum and co-author of the research report. "Corn and Peruvian pepper-tree berries were used to make the beer, which was drunk from elaborate beakers up to half a gallon in volume."

Water had to be brought up from a thousand feet below the city's 8,000-foot mountaintop perch.

Archaeologists have spent years excavating the remnants of the city, which sits on a mesa called Cerro Baúl. The latest findings were published Monday in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Evidence left behind

Inside the brewery, which was first discovered and announced last year, researchers have since found several elegant metal shawl pins sprawled across the floor. The pins were not found elsewhere in the city.

"The brewers were not only women, but elite women," Donna Nash, an adjunct curator at the Field Museum and part of the study team, said Monday. "They weren't slaves, and they weren't people of low status. So the fact that they made the beer probably made it even more special."

It's not clear why the shawl pins were on the floor. But the brewery would have been warm from the fires used to heat brewing urns. "Perhaps the heat forced the brewers to remove their shawls, and the pins were lost in the process," speculates Williams.

It's also possible the women left the pins as part of a going-away ceremony.

Evidence shows the brewery was set afire, then the ceremonial mugs were tossed into the fire. "Are the women throwing in their shawl pins at the same time guys are throwing their cups? It's a possibility," said Mike Moseley from the University of Florida.

The high-altitude city bordered the rival Tiwanaku empire.

"This is the only place where two empires were making face-to-face contact, and it's that contact that helps explain this site – it's both defensible and very impressive," Moseley said.

Traditions continued

The discovery suggests a precursor to an aspect of Incan society documented by Spanish observers after conquest in the 15th Century: Noble Incan women were that society's top brewers.

Bits of Wari society may have carried forward even to today, says Susan deFrance, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Florida. Modern Andean drinking culture is unlike many Western societies, in which women tend to drink less.

"There's a lot of equality in terms of how men and women drink in the highlands of Andes," deFrance said. "Women will get as rip-roaring drunk, if not more so, than men."

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