Uncorking the Past

by Patrick E. McGovern

  When the sea level dropped 120 meters and exposed Beringia in glacial times, it did not remain barren tundra for long. Within centuries, if not decades, it was carpeted in heath meadows and swathed in birch forests, teeming with animal life, that invited human migration and exploitation. But movement farther south was blocked by massive ice packs along the northwest coast and inland. It would take another thousand years before a passage through the interior was freed up. Even today, the inland route can be formidable, as my wife discovered when she drove our Volkswagen camper nearly seven hundred kilometers along the Dempster Highway, north from Dawson City in the Yukon Territory to Inuvik on the Arctic Ocean. She was greeted by spectacular birdlife and the occasional grizzly bear, but the open tundra, punctuated with numerous marshes and moraines, is virtually impassible in warmer weather, except by following the elevated, two-lane gravel “highway.”

  Rather than slog across wide expanses of ice or boggy tundra, early humans likely saw another opportunity. By following the Inside Passage along the northwest coast by boat, they could have leapfrogged from one secluded bay to the next, following a strategy similar to the one we believe humans followed in hopping from oasis to oasis in Central Asia or from island to island in the Mediterranean. When the ice packs along the coast began to melt, between about 17,000 and 15,000 B.P., ice-free refuges were formed in estuaries, which would have been a fisherman’s and fruit gatherer’s paradise.

  Anyone who has traveled the Inside Passage today can attest to its rich marine and plant resources. Meandering in and out of fjords, bordered by densely forested mountains, early peoples could have feasted on wild strawberries, soapberries, elderberries, fruits of the manzanita (whose name in Spanish means “little apple”), thimbleberries, and salmonberries. By throwing a line or net over the side of a boat or by wading through shallow waters with digging sticks, they could have landed a huge king salmon or halibut, or collected tasty clams and mussels.

  American archaeologists have not been as fortunate as their Mediterranean counterparts in discovering the boats that the early Americans used to make their maiden voyages. Homo sapiens had already crossed open water to reach Australia by 40,000 B.P., so we can infer that the peoples inhabiting Siberia had their own kinds of watercraft, whether log rafts, leather kayaks, or reed boats. Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian adventurer, proved the basic concept of Ice Age sea travel when he sailed his balsawood raft Kon-Tiki (an older name for the Incan sun god) nearly seven thousand kilometers across the Pacific Ocean to Polynesia from Peru.

  The early coastal settlements that served as the stopovers for the boats, however, have yet to be discovered. These sites and boats must have disappeared beneath the sea as the glaciers melted and the sea level rose. Some innovative underwater archaeology along the lines of Robert Ballard’s (see chapter 6) will be needed to uncover the evidence. Negative arguments leave a lot to be desired, as much as they spur new exploration. But if the land route was blocked by ice, there can be only one explanation for the very early founding of a site like Monte Verde in southern South America: the first wave of human settlers during the glacial period must have traveled by boat.

  A MARITIME PEOPLE WITH A PENCHANT FOR UNUSUAL BEVERAGES

  Monte Verde did more than pound a nail into the coffin of the Clovis First theory. It had other surprises in store. The site was situated on a tributary of the Maullín River, in a cool, moist birch forest. The rising waters of the stream eventually submerged the settlement and encased it in a peat bog. The result was some of the most remarkable preservation of organic materials at any Palaeolithic site in the Old or New World.

  Map 3. The Americas. Humans crossed over the Bering land bridge (Beringia) by around 20,000 B.P. Many fermentable natural products were discovered and converted into beverages over the coming millennia, including honey, maize (corn), cacao pod, and probably many other fruits (e.g., Peruvian pepper tree), root crops (such as manioc or cassava), and grasses. These drinks were often mixed together with “medicinal” herbs, tree resins, and other additives (including chili, vanilla, and blood).

  The excavators uncovered two structures made of log and plank foundations, secured by wooden stakes, and walls made of animal hides tied by reed ropes to poles. One building, probably the living quarters for the community, was twenty meters long and subdivided into individual chambers by interior log-plank and pelt walls. Each chamber had a small fire pit, from around which was recovered the detritus of meals. Together with remains of mastodon, paleo-llama, and freshwater mollusks, the food debris included quantities of seeds, nuts, tubers (including wild potato), mushrooms, and berries. A second, similar building was devoted to butchering mastodons and preparing their hides, to judge from the congealed animal fat that covered its floor.

  The range of plants that the community exploited reads like a pharmacological and nutritional cornucopia. The rich forest and bog environs of the site provided more than enough supplies to tide the inhabitants over the winter. Indeed, based on the plant and animal remains, the excavators believe that these first Americans inhabited their settlement year-round, a phenomenon generally associated with the beginnings of the Neolithic Revolution elsewhere in the world several thousand years later.

  The Monte Verdeans also ranged up into the high forest, two hundred kilometers north of the site, to collect the leaves and fruits of the boldo tree (Peumus boldus), which have marked medicinal and hallucinogenic effects. They made up quids for chewing by combining the boldo with local junco reed, which produces delicious young shoots, and, most intriguingly, no fewer than seven species of seaweed from the Chilean coast. The presence of seaweed at an inland site betrays the people’s close connection to the ocean and quite possibly their original migration route. Seaweeds, of course, are extremely nutritious: they provide a full complement of trace elements, some protein, and vitamins A and B12, in addition to aiding the body’s immune system and contributing to beneficial calcium and cholesterol metabolism.

  A host of other saltwater marsh and dune plants were exploited for food and medicine, in particular foxtail (Polygonum sanguinaria), which acts as an analgesic, diuretic, and fever reducer. The salt content of these plants also filled a nutritional gap in the diet that was not met by the local flora.

  One plant, club moss (Lycopodium sp.), came from the Andean grasslands fifty kilometers away. Whether gathered by the inhabitants themselves or obtained from exchanges with others, club moss constituted the most prevalent archaeobotanical material recovered from Monte Verde, with seventeen thousand spores found distributed over thirty-three locations. The highly flammable spores could have served as a fire starter or been used as a talcumlike skin powder to offset the high humidity, still a common practice among the local Mapuche Indians.

  For me, it was particularly exciting to learn that the Monte Verde diet included many edible berries and the abundant bulrush (Scirpus and Carex spp.), which are eminently fermentable. Even today, the Mapuche use at least two fruits found at the site—Aristotelia chilensis (a deciduous shrub, also known as the maqui) and Amomyrtus luma (a fragrant evergreen)—to make fermented beverages (chichas). Sweet bulrush stalks, leaves, and rhizomes are known to have been chewed by Paleoindian and Archaic Americans as early as about 10,000 B.P. in caves in the southwestern United States, where quids were found. Wild potato tubers (Solanum magalia) might also have been masticated at Monte Verde; an especially powerful potato chicha is made today by the Mapuche and Huilliche peoples, albeit by saccharifying the potato starch with barley malt. Enzymes in human saliva break down starches into sugars, so chewing a plant to enhance its sweetness was likely one of the first ways that humans discovered how to make a fermentable mash. East Asians and Pacific Islanders still practice this ancient technique in making rice wine (see chapter 2).

  But did the early Monte Verdeans make an alcoholic beverage from a fruit, or by chewing and spitting out the sweet juice of a bulrush or some other starchy plant? It is reasonable to assume that they collected the berri
es in some kind of container, as the abundant fruit ripens quickly during late summer and fall and must be gathered before it spoils. Once fruit has been piled into a container in a boggy climate, rife with microorganisms, fermentation cannot be far behind. Unfortunately, the excavators have not yet recovered any containers that might have held a fermented beverage and could be tested. Woven reeds, which are known to have been made into rope, might have been made into containers. Wooden containers are another good possibility, especially as wooden grinding mortars were preserved and found at the site. The latter even had traces of junco, bulrush, and wild potato embedded in their surfaces from grinding the starch-rich plants, perhaps as a first step in preparing a fermented beverage. No quids of these plant remains, however, have yet been recovered at the site.

  The Monte Verdeans obviously possessed deep knowledge of the region’s natural resources. They knew which plants and animals could meet their needs for food, fuel, shelter, and drugs. Long before the intricate mythologies and religions of later peoples, they had probably begun to explore the mind-altering effects of alcoholic beverages and hallucinogens. Such finely tuned information must have been generations in the making, which once again underscores the likelihood that humans did not dawdle in the Arctic but speedily made their way southward by boat. By moving inland, the Monte Verdeans could enjoy the natural bounty and diversity of ocean, marsh, river, and mountains. People at Quebrada Tacahuay and Quebrada Jaquay in southern Peru, by contrast, inhabited shoreline settlements between about 11,000 and 10,000 B.P.; they enjoyed a satisfying diet of anchovies, cormorants, mollusks, and crustaceans, but not much else.

  CHEWING THE CUD

  In the past decade, a wealth of new information about the first American domesticated plants has been revealed by archaeobotany, phytolith and pollen study, starch-grain identification, and stable isotope and DNA analyses. Many of the staples or “founder crops” of American cuisine can now be traced back to a period shortly after 10,000 B.P.

  Findings from Guilá Naquitz cave in Oaxaca, Mexico, and from villages in the lower Peruvian Andes suggest that squash (Cucurbita sp.) was the earliest domesticate. Peanut (Arachis sp.), long dismissed as a latecomer, has been dated as early as 8,500 B.P., according to wild-looking specimens found at Andean sites; these are distant from the peanut’s presumed area of origin in the Amazon Basin, suggesting earlier cultivation. Quinoa (Chenopodium sp.) seeds have an equally long ancestry. Domesticated peppers (Capsicum sp.) from two sites in Ecuador come in somewhat later, around 6000 B.P., where they were associated with corn (maize), manioc or cassava, squash, beans, and palm root as part of a broader agricultural complex. Cotton (Gossypium sp.), again from the Peruvian sites, is similarly dated to ca. 6000 B.P. The organic remains from Monte Verde also indicate that coca, potato, and many other plants were also likely manipulated, cultivated, and eventually domesticated by humans at a very early date. So it seems that the first immigrants to the New World were as agriculturally innovative as their Old World counterparts.

  The shift from hunting and gathering and the increasing reliance on domesticated plants is especially intriguing because it is a worldwide phenomenon. Northern South America, the Andes and Amazonia, and southern Mexico are at the forefront of the Neolithic Revolution in the Americas, whereas East Asia and the Near East paved the way in Asia. Theories of economic and climatic determinism argue that the impetus for domestication in these “centers of origin” came from the warming trend at the end of the Ice Age. Plants thrived in an atmosphere much richer in carbon dioxide, and human populations grew in response. Then a global cold snap called the Younger Dryas, around 13,000 B.P., threw these burgeoning communities back on their own resources. Forced to focus on high-carbohydrate plants to survive, over time and by trial and error they domesticated these plants for their ease in harvesting, nutritional value, and other desirable traits.

  By contrast, the Palaeolithic and drunken monkey hypotheses (see chapter 1) contend that humans were motivated by more than economic necessity. Because they were “driven to drink,” they intensively explored and exploited their surroundings for sugar-rich resources which could be made into fermented beverages. If the early Americans came from East Asia, where we have the earliest chemical evidence for a fermented beverage, they probably already had some knowledge of how to make such a beverage. As they traveled through the Inside Passage, explored the coast of South America, and began moving into the interior, they would have been on the lookout for these potential sugar resources. Berries and honey, when available, entered into alcoholic beverages that were central to social and religious life. In many parts of the New World, however, humans faced environments that were too dry, too cold or too hot, or too high to support sugar-rich fruits or wild bees.

  Then came what must be the most far-fetched human experiment in domestication ever attempted—the cultivation of maize (genus Zea). The seeming impossibility of this endeavor was likely overcome by an overpowering desire of humans to alter their consciousness by alcohol.

  A series of careful DNA studies identified teosinte (genus Tripsacum) as the wild ancestor of maize. This mountain grass grows in the Río Balsas drainage of southwestern Mexico. One cannot imagine a less inspiring plant to domesticate. The ears of this primitive corn, which are barely three centimeters long and contain only five to twelve kernels, are trapped in a tough casing. Even if you manage to free up the kernels, their nutrient value is essentially nil. Eating just one of the five hundred or more large, juicy kernels in a modern ear of corn provides the nutritional equivalent of an entire teosinte ear. But there was a logic to the early Americans’ seeming madness.

  As teosinte was domesticated, starting around 6000 B.P., it lost its many thin stalks in favor of a single stem, and the number of kernels and ear size increased. At the same time, it became one of those rare domesticates whose propagation depends solely on humans’ extracting the kernels from the husk and replanting them. Such a monumental effort had its rewards. The resulting maize was soon transported to other parts of the Americas, and wherever it went, it became imbued with supernatural significance, especially when it was transformed into chicha, a generic Spanish term for any American fermented beverage but most often equated with corn beer.

  Chicha’s importance in the social and religious world of ancient South America can best be appreciated by focusing on the drink’s central role in the much later Incan empire of Peru. Spanish chroniclers in the fifteenth century A.D., including F. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Bernabé Cobo, Girolamo Banzoni and others, describe and illustrate how chicha was prepared, distributed to work parties, drunk in massive amounts at feasts, offered to gods and ancestors, and shared according to strict protocols. For example, at the Incan capital of Cusco, the king poured chicha into a gold bowl incorporated into the navel of the Incan universe, an ornamental stone dais with throne and pillar in the central plaza. The chicha cascaded down this “gullet of the Sun God” to the Temple of the Sun as awestruck spectators watched. At most festivals, ordinary people participated in days of prodigious drinking after the main feast, and the Spanish looked on aghast at the drunkenness. Human sacrifices first had to be rubbed in the dregs of chicha and then tube-fed with more chicha for days while lying buried alive in tombs. Special sacred places, scattered throughout the empire, and mummies of previous kings and ancestors were ritually bathed in maize flour and presented with chicha offerings to the accompaniment of dancing and pan-pipe music. Even today, Peruvians sprinkle some chicha on Mother Earth from the communal cup when they sit down together to drink; the cup then proceeds around the group according to social status as an unending succession of toasts are offered.

  The Spanish chroniclers recorded that the making and serving of chicha was a woman’s activity, as it often has been elsewhere. The Incan rulers isolated groups of beautiful women (mamakona) to remain chaste for life and to make the chicha for the festivals and palace life. Special sites (e.g., Huánuco Pampa along the Inca Trail), together with elaborately
constructed terraces and irrigation systems, were devoted to growing maize and making chicha on a vast scale. The women of a village or royal facility rolled balls of maize flour in their mouths until their saliva broke the starches down into sugars. This mash was heated and diluted, and the resulting liquid was fermented in a container for two to three days, usually reaching an alcohol content of about 5 percent. At modern social gatherings and festivals, women still sit apart with their jars of chicha and serve the men engaged in their drinking rituals.

  The Andean archaeological record is replete with vessels for making, serving, and drinking chicha. These include cups (keros), high-necked decanters (aribalos), jars (tinajas and upus) of various sizes, and intricate trick drinking vessels (pacchas) in which the beverage is directed through a maze of channels from an upper container. These pottery containers can take various shapes, such as corncobs, llama heads, and reed boats mounted on long handles. Pacchas were even made from enemy skulls, which were sometimes outfitted with intercommunicating gold bowls and silver drinking tubes through the top of the skull and the mouth. When you walk through a museum gallery of pre-Columbian South American antiquities, you are probably looking at the accumulated debris of numerous drinking fests, similar to the elaborate bronze vessels of Shang Dynasty China or the drinking sets of the classical Greek symposiasts. The Incas not only drank copious amounts of their fermented beverages, but they also devised intricate artistic creations for the conspicuous display and enjoyment of their drinks.