Uncorking the Past

by Patrick E. McGovern

  During the next century, two burials within another tumulus at Glauberg, northeast of Frankfurt, illustrate how men of different status were treated in death. The first was laid out in a wood chamber in all his gold finery and with an iron lance and sword. A half-meter-tall, four-liter bronze jug was prominent: it was wrapped in a cloth and encircled with a blue ribbon. Again, pollen removed from the substantial residue inside the vessel showed that it was full of a honey mead when it was buried. The second man had been cremated and was buried in a simple grave. He wore no gold jewelry, and apart from his weapons, his only grave good was a jug more than twice the size of that in the first burial. A smaller relative percentage of honey, however, suggested that it contained a mixed beverage, less expensive than pure honey mead, perhaps in keeping with his apparently lower social position.

  The many cauldrons from the sixth-century B.C. Western Hallstatt and the fifth-century early La Tène territories of central Europe show how one culture can adopt and adapt the accoutrements of another society. Wine was still a rare commodity in central Europe, and the cauldrons were not used to mix wine and water as was customary in the south. Rather, the vessels, which were produced by Greek and Etruscan craftsmen in the largest size possible specifically for the northern export market, proved ideal for preparing and presenting the Nordic grog at festivals and banquets. Their ostentatiousness made them the consummate burial offerings for rulers and other notables.

  Because of the inherent limitations of palynology in recovering evidence for cereals and fruits, we cannot know for certain that the Hochdorf beverage, or those from Scotland and Denmark, was made only from honey. The fermentation of pure honey, however, yields a beverage higher in alcohol, and its flavor is enhanced by the addition of flowers and herbs. As such, mead might have been a higher-status drink than grog, at least during certain periods and in particular parts of northern Europe (for example, Viking Scandinavia during the Middle Ages; see below).

  Even if the Hochdorf beverage was a pure mead, we know that some local people were also making and enjoying barley and wheat beer. The archaeobotanist Hans-Peter Stika identified thick layers of a dark malt, covered with charcoal, in eight 6-meter-long ditches at the fortified settlement nearby. (It could well be that the upper-class male in the Hochdorf tomb was the local chieftain of this stronghold.) Stika proposes that the pits were used to sprout the barley and then dry and toast it with an open fire lit from one end to yield a smoky-tasting malt. Pits of this kind have been found only at Hochdorf, and they were evidently intended for mass production, perhaps a thousand liters of beer at a time. Because no brewing vats were found, he suggests that wooden vessels, now disintegrated, were used, heated with fire- cracked stones (as with the beer perhaps prepared in the fulachta fiadh). Mugwort and carrot, archaeobotanical remains of which were associated with the malt, would have helped to spice it. Elevated lactic-acid bacteria in the malt suggest that the final brew was sour, like a Belgian red or brown ale.

  In order to test the temperatures and times needed to prepare and toast or kiln the malt, the Stuttgarter Hofbräu brewery prepared an experimental batch of “Celtic beer,” which was served up at a local festival in period costume to rave reviews. The ancient brewery is prima facie evidence that barley and wheat beer was available at the site and might easily have been added to the Hochdorf beverage. Perhaps some additional fruit juice, herbs, or spices were also mixed into the honey-rich beverage.

  Two first-century A.D. drinking horns found close together in a peat bog in the Haderslev region of southern Jutland in Denmark illustrate the challenge of determining the full complement of ingredients in any northern European grog. According to an archaeobotanical analysis carried out by Johannes Grüss in the first half of the twentieth century, now seriously questioned, one horn contained mostly malted emmer wheat and the other primarily honey pollen. Grüss interpreted his evidence straightforwardly: one horn had been filled with wheat beer and the other with mead. But why should two nearly identical horns, found so close together, contain different beverages? It is more likely that both horns originally contained a mixed beverage of beer and mead, and that because of misguided cleaning and restoration efforts when the horns were found, Grüss’s analyses were not fully representative of the original contents.

  Archaeobotanical analyses of residues from later vessels of the Viking Age (ca. A.D. 800–1100)—especially a large collection of bronze bowls buried individually in graves on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea—show that a mixed fermented drink continued to be popular in Scandinavia. As late as the seventeenth century, mølska, which combined honey, malt, and a fruit juice, was still being drunk at the Swedish royal court.

  RETRACING THE TRACKS OF THE VIKINGS

  My own interest in Nordic grog and the role of wine in northern Europe was piqued by three extended sojourns in Sweden and Denmark. As the pottery specialist of a Scandinavian team investigating a Bronze–Iron Age site in Jordan, I was invited to study the excavated material that had been brought back to Scandinavia. As a visiting professor first at the University of Uppsala and then at the University of Copenhagen, I found myself ideally situated to learn more about Nordic culture, especially its fermented beverages. In between the periods of study in Uppsala and Copenhagen, I spent another three months in the spring of 1994 at the Archaeological Research Laboratory of the University of Stockholm as a Fulbright scholar. I had the opportunity to meet many scholars, archaeologists, and scientists whose work touched on the fascinating field of ancient fermented beverages. One meeting, one artifact, and one set of research findings must suffice to encapsulate my whole experience.

  One weekend, my wife and I traveled by boat to the island of Gotland, a four- to five-hour trip from Stockholm. There we were met by the resident archaeologist and expert on Gotland’s history, Erik Nylén. Erik first showed us our room, a restored apartment from medieval times precariously balanced on the old city wall of the capital at Visby. Next he took us on a whirlwind tour of the island, which is about sixty-five kilometers long and thirty kilometers wide. We stopped to see the progress on replicas of Viking ships, which were being built by local farmers and used to follow the trail of the Viking adventurers up the rivers of Germany and Poland, through the mountains of central Europe, and down to Constantinople (modern Istanbul). Besides the sheer amount of labor involved in this expedition, Erik said, a major problem was obtaining enough beer and other potables each day to keep the crew happy. Particularly in Eastern European countries at the time, liquor stores had very short opening hours and had to be sought out early in the day. As we continued our tour of Gotland’s archaeological sites, we sampled the local drink, Gotlandsdryka, a spiced barley beer with juniper extract that is still enjoyed at mealtimes in southern Gotland. Locally available sugars, such as honey, are often added to the brew.

  We spent the following day examining ancient residues for possible analysis at the museum. The sample we finally settled on was a dark deposit that filled the holes of a long-handled straining cup. This sieve was part of a larger set, dated to the first century A.D., that comprised an imported Roman bucket (situla), a ladle, and several “sauce pans” or drinking cups. They had all been found and excavated by Erik in a cache (see plate 7) under the floor at the settlement of Havor in the southern part of the island. The deposit also included a filigreed and granulated gold torque and two bronze bells.

  Back in Stockholm, I went to work on the dark residue embedded in the Havor sieve at the archaeometry laboratory, the “Green Villa,” nestled in the heart of the university campus and then directed by Birgit Arrhenius. Sven Isaksson, a doctoral candidate who has since published his dissertation, “Food and Rank in Early Medieval Times,” joined in the effort. Using gas chromatography, Sven obtained evidence that lipids, including fatty acids and what were likely degradation products of beeswax, made up part of the residue.

  I took a sample of the Havor residue back to my laboratory in Philadelphia for further study. The deposit
’s infrared spectrum was consistent with that of modern beeswax and pointed to the presence of tartaric acid and tartrate salt, marker compounds of grapes and wine. Recent follow-up gas chromatographic–mass spectrometric analyses, using much more sensitive equipment, have shown that the residue is also dominated by birch-resin components (the triterpenoids lupeol and betulin, as well as characteristic long-chain dioic acids).

  We have detected birch resin in even earlier beverage containers, including a straining cup from the Danish site of Kostræde, dating to about 800 B.C. (Beeswax components in this sample also marked the presence of honey mead.) Birch resin has been used since at least the Neolithic period for a variety of purposes, including as a mastic to hold haftings onto weapons and tools and as a sealant. Lumps with human tooth impressions from the Swiss lake settlements and a site in Finland suggest that they were chewed as gum. Because some of the compounds in birch resin have analgesic and antibiotic effects, the goal might well have been to alleviate pain or protect against tooth decay. A sugar alcohol derived from birch wood—xylitol—is still used today in Finnish chewing gum as a sweetener and cavity inhibitor. The famous frozen mummy found high in the Italian Ötztal Alps, affectionately known as the Ice Man or Ötzi, carried an extremely well-made copper axe affixed to its yew haft with birch resin. Ötzi also carried birch fungus, which has antibacterial properties and might have been used by the itinerant mountaineer to treat his sores.

  Although birch resin is not as sweet as maple sap, it too flows freely in the spring and would have been long ago recognized for its medicinal value, attractive flavor, and potential in making fermented beverages. The common man’s drink in Russia today, kvass (“leaven”), perpetuates this ancient European tradition; in addition to leavened rye, wheat, or barley bread, which when soaked and fermented produce a mildly (1–1.5 percent) alcoholic drink, birch sap and various fruits are sometimes thrown into the brew.

  The upshot of our findings was that the Havor situla had contained a Nordic grog in which grape wine was the principal fruit ingredient. The beverage had been ladled out and sieved through the straining cup to remove vegetal and insect matter before it was served in the cups. Subsequently we obtained similar evidence from other samples that I had brought back from Sweden, including the Viking Age bronze bowls from tombs on Gotland mentioned above, which have been carefully studied by Gustaf Trotzig of the National Antiquities Service. Wine continued to be a popular import into northern Europe, according to the ancient organics that we found inside tin-covered liturgical vessels and relief-band jars brought from the Rhineland of central Germany. These vessels had been recovered from what has been called the first city in Sweden, the ninth-century town of Birka, along an estuary south of Stockholm.

  Elsewhere in Scandinavia, wine gradually gained in importance, even when it was merely combined with mead or beer to make the traditional Nordic grog. Juellinge, on the Danish island of Lolland in the Baltic Sea, illustrates the pattern, originating in Roman times, that spread out to encompass the rest of Denmark, southern Sweden (Scandia), Gotland, and parts of Norway and Finland. The exceptionally rich burial goods from Juellinge, now on display in the National Museum in Copenhagen, include large, imported situlae like the one from Havor, drinking horns, ladles and strainers, and silver drinking cups. Enough space was always left at the head of each burial to deposit the drinking set and other items. Based on his examination of residues in the Juellinge vessels, Bille Gram contended that they had contained both barley beer and a fruit wine. He did not mention mead, but my laboratory has now obtained evidence of the characteristic beeswax compounds from a dark deposit inside one of the second-century A.D. situlae, which the National Museum of Denmark allowed me to sample. It remains to be determined whether grapes went into the grog.

  The Roman wine set became a fixture in Scandinavian tombs. At Simris in Scandia, for example, the woman in grave 1 held a wine strainer in her hand, while the rest of the drinking set lay at her head, toward the north. European precedents for this practice can be found as early as l200 B.C. in the Urnfield culture of central Europe, when bronze buckets, handled cups, and strainers were common items in burials. Larger cauldrons were sometimes mounted on wheels, like those from Ystad in Scandia, Milavec in Bohemia, and Skallerup on the island of Zealand in Denmark. The later introduction of Roman drinking vessels into the continent elaborated on this tradition, which eventually encompassed almost all of Europe.

  MIDAS RECIDIVUS

  Turning the clock back again to the sixth century B.C., certain details of the Hochdorf burial preclude direct comparison with the Midas tumulus. The male at Hochdorf, for example, wore the personal jewelry and carried the weapons of a Celtic warrior: a decorated gold armlet, a gold torque around his neck, and an iron dagger in a gold scabbard. The male in the Midas tumulus wore garments fastened only with bronze brooches (fibulae) and a belt, and he was not armed. Indeed, none of the artifacts from this tomb were even made of gold. Is it significant that the single Hochdorf cauldron was still almost completely filled with a beverage, whereas the three Midas cauldrons were totally depleted? Probably not. A greater supply of the beverage could have been prepared at Hochdorf, more than enough to satisfy a smaller group of mourners and leave some in the cauldron for the chieftain’s journey into the afterlife. At Gordion, the beverage was doled out in more than one hundred bowls to a larger group, so it is not surprising that the cauldrons were empty.

  Even so, the similarities between the Hochdorf burial and the Midas tumulus raise an enticing question: Might the origins of the Phrygians be sought in central Europe rather than in northern Greece, the Balkans, or eastern Europe? Perhaps they followed the Danube down to the Black Sea and crossed over the Bosporus into Turkey. In the third century B.C., the Galatians followed this route to Gordion. The earlier Phrygians could have brought a central European tradition of a mixed fermented beverage with them to Anatolia. According to this hypothesis and the cultural conservatism inherent to fermented beverages, during the early Iron Age the Phrygians probably entered a sparsely inhabited region of Anatolia, where they used the plentiful supply of grapes as the main fruit component in their version of the beverage. As they were already familiar with honey and barley, they continued to use them in the Phrygian grog.

  As more and more vineyards were planted in the Near East and wine improved during the first millennium B.C., varietal wines from particular regions became a mark of civilized life, marginalizing the more “barbaric” beer and mead. The consumption of grogs was increasingly confined to esoteric religious ceremonies. The occasional mulsum, in which grape must and honey were fermented together (according to the Roman agricultural writer Columella), or omphacomelitis, a fermented mixture of unripe grapes and honey, might be prepared from time to time. Mead is known to have remained a specialty of the Phrygians until at least the first century A.D., according to Pliny the Elder (Natural History 14.113). The Phrygians were also notorious for their beer, which they sometimes drank out of large pots with tubes while engaged in contorted sexual acts like those illustrated in Mesopotamia centuries earlier. As the seventh-century Greek lyric poet Archilochos caustically put it: “[He has intercourse or fellatio with her] . . . just like a Thracian or Phrygian man sucked barley beer through a reed, and she was bent over working hard” (fr. 42 West in Athenaeus, The Scholars at Dinner 10.447b). Nevertheless, such tastes were the exception rather than the rule by Roman times.

  Wine eventually was accepted by the northern Celts both as a fruit source and a beverage. At first it arrived in a trickle, carried only in amphoras from Marseille (ancient Massalia). That trickle soon became a torrent as the Celts’ own technological contributions to the storage and transport of fermented beverages—large wooden barrels—were packed onto oxcarts and boats and made their way inland. After Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul in the first century B.C., the domesticated grapevine of the Mediterranean and beyond began to be planted up the Rhône River and along the Mosel and the Rhine in Germany.


  SIX

  SAILING THE WINE-DARK MEDITERRANEAN

  MY WIFE AND I CAUGHT our first glimpse of the azure Mediterranean in 1971, when we traveled south from Germany to Italy, on our way to a kibbutz in Israel and my first archaeological adventures in the Middle East. We had been picking grapes on the Mosel River, and when temperatures dropped in early October, we needed to move to warmer climes. A chill ran up my spine, not from cold but excitement, when we espied the Mediterranean from the high bluff overlooking Monaco. We felt blessed, just as the vineyards of the Mosel were that summer, and we looked forward to leaving Western culture behind and entering the exotic world of the east.

  Our journey to the Levant showed us the mercurial nature of the Mediterranean. An all-night ferry across the Adriatic Sea from Bari in Italy to Dubrovnik in the old Yugoslavia shook us to pieces. That crossing was followed by idyllic days and nights on the decks of Greek ferries as we plied Homer’s “wine-dark” Aegean. We eventually reached Beirut, then regarded as the Paris of the Middle East with its broad boulevards and luxurious lifestyle.

  We could not cross into Israel by land, because the border was closed, as usual. Instead we went down to the Beirut harbor and found a boat that would take us to Cyprus. A small Danish freighter took pity on us, and we were signed on as first mate and assistant cook. We spent the next week luxuriating on the Mediterranean, drinking unlimited quantities of Tuborg beer, enjoying a Christmas dinner with the crew, and using the boat as a hotel to visit nearby Salamis, one of great ancient cities of the Mediterranean, when we arrived in the Cypriot port of Famagusta. Such is the magic of this sea.