Uncorking the Past

by Patrick E. McGovern

  And drink they did. In the patio in front of the large industrial complex, twenty-eight high-status keros (see plate 9) were found. There were seven sets of four vessels each, decorated with elite white-and-black designs or displaying the supreme Front-Facing God of the Wari, with pronounced eyes and a high headdress. The keros were graduated in size from thirty milliliters to more than a liter, probably reflecting the social status of the drinkers; the “King Midas feast” celebrants were also distinguished by the size of their drinking vessels (see chapter 5). When the brewery or beer hall, according to the excavators’ terminology, had been set ablaze, the twenty-eight Wari lords apparently threw their keros, in a final act of dedication, into the fire. Six shell and stone necklaces were thrown on to the smoldering heap for good measure.

  The Wari fermented beverage was conspicuously unlike the preeminent beverage of ancient Peru, corn chicha. If any maize was added to the S. molle wine, the quantity was trivial: the cereal constituted less than 1 percent of the total archaeobotanical materials recovered from the site, including the winemaking facility.

  The final rites for the colony atop Cerro Baúl were repeated in the palace. In an interior patio, food remains suggest that the inhabitants enjoyed an extraordinary “last supper”: vizcacha (Andean hare), venison, llama or alpaca, and no fewer than ten species of fish (including anchovy, sardine, herring, silverside, flying fish, and tuna). The site was, of course, not far from the Pacific, but these leftovers suggest that the inhabitants of the site, like those of Monte Verde, traced their origins to the sea. Other bones from the palace—of the Andean condor, a flycatcher, and a pygmy owl—need not have been part of the repast: these are very rare birds and might instead have conveyed some ritual significance. More than thirty serving vessels, but no keros, were smashed on the floor of the patio before the building was burned down.

  Another ceremony by fire was carried out in an annex to one of the temples, close to the palace. Together with burials of an infant and adolescent below its floor, one room produced a most unusual artifact: the body of a drum painted with stylized birds and naked dancers, whose frontal positions and high headdresses were reminiscent of the Front-Facing God. Drums, along with percussion instruments, pan pipes, flutes, and trumpets, were an essential part of shamanistic ceremonies throughout the Americas from an early date. For example, at the late Archaic city-state of Caral on the Pacific coast of Peru, dated between 3000 and 1800 B.C., thirty-two flutes of pelican wing bones were found hidden in a crevice of the main temple, probably an offering after a particularly auspicious ceremony.

  The S. molle wine must have been a cultural and ethnic marker of great importance among the Wari. Recently, a winemaking facility similar to the one at Cerro Baúl was uncovered in the heartland of the Wari at Conchopata, several hundred kilometers to the north. A nonelite household winery was also found a short distance downriver from Conchopata at La Yaral, inhabited by the Chiribaya, who continued the Wari tradition. In both buildings, archaeobotanical remains of S. molle were strewn in the vicinity of hearths and heating vats.

  A WEALTH AND DEARTH OF FERMENTED BEVERAGES

  Making a peppery wine, transforming a minuscule mountain grass into the world’s most prolific source of alcohol, and fashioning elaborate drinks from cacao pods and beans are just a few examples of early Americans’ ingenuity in crafting fermented beverages—a foretaste of the future, you might say. In other parts of the Americas, a range of other ingredients were used, some of them still popular today.

  In Amazonia, manioc or cassava (Manihot esculenta, also known as yuca and arrowroot) has been a favorite ingredient for at least six thousand years. A beer can be prepared from the thick roots of the plant by chewing them and releasing their sweet juices or converting their starch to sugar (as with maize stalks and kernels). Saliva was believed to have a magical power that was conveyed to the brew, causing it to bubble wildly and turn into a potent beverage. The drink was essential to feasts of all kinds—for accessing the ancestral realm, celebrating a victory, marking rites of passage, and observing astronomical cycles.

  Humans elsewhere in South America—in the mountains and pampas and along the coasts—had many other fermentable and mind-altering natural products to choose from. Sugar-rich fruits, which could be easily plucked from a tree, were probably exploited first. The peach palm (Bactris gasipaes) is one example: its sap and pinkish fruit pulp make a delicious, mildly alcoholic drink. Chonta and coyol palms, wild pineapple (Ananas bracteatus), the plumlike Gourliea decorticans, cacti (including Opuntia tuna and the saguaro), and Tizyphus mistol, which looks like a luscious grape, were among a host of other possibilities. The drinks could be mixed with more powerful herbs, such as ground tobacco or coca leaves; the seeds of angel’s trumpet (Brugmansia spp.); a decoction of San Pedro cactus or seed pods of the yopo or cebil tree (Anadenanthera spp.), rich in indoxyl compounds; or a tea made from ayahuasca (literally “vine of the soul”; Banisteriopsis spp.), which produces visual hallucinations and today is the focus of a rapidly expanding shamanistic New Age religion.

  Farther north in Central America and southern Mexico, hog plums (Spondias spp.), cherrylike Prunus capuli, the prickly custard apple or guanabana (Annona muricata), pineapples, coyol and corozo palms, cashew, and wild banana are some of the many fruits that were made into wine. Sweet potatoes and manioc were chewed to make beer. In the Yucatán and the Chiapas highlands, a mead was fermented from the native honey. The Lacandón Maya of Chiapas prepared theirs in quantity in hollowed-out logs shaped like canoes, to which the bark of one particular tree, the balché (Lonchocarpus longistylus), was added. A Spanish informant described it as “milk white, sour to the smell, and at first very disagreeable to the taste.” Of course, an alcoholic beverage could also be spiked with a hallucinogenic drug derived from the seeds of morning glory (Ipomoea and Turbina spp.) or the psilocybin mushroom.

  Ingredients for fermented beverages become scarcer as one moves up into the cactus regions of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. There is some evidence for the use of elderberry, manzanita, and wild grape to make wine in the more temperate regions along the Pacific coast; in the interior, fermented beverages made from the fruits of agave, prickly pear, organ-pipe and other cacti, and especially mesquite pods, with 25 to 30 percent glucose in their pulp, were well entrenched from an early date. Rainmaking ceremonies centered on wine made from the giant saguaro were the most important festivals of the year for the Tohono O’odham people of the Sonoran Desert. Women matured the wine underground and encouraged it by repeating the refrain: “Do you ferment and let us be beautifully drunk.” Two nights of singing, dancing, and carousing were intended to encourage rain clouds to form and drop their lifeengendering liquid.

  North and east of central Arizona, however, alcoholic beverages are mysteriously absent from the archaeological and ethnographic record. As a seventeenth-century French missionary, Gabriel Sagard, observed: “Our savages, in their feasts, are, thank God, free from such misfortune, for they use neither wine, beer nor cider; if any one among them asks for a drink, which very rarely happens, he is offered fresh water” (Havard 1896: 33).

  When the Vikings first visited North America a thousand years ago, they marveled at the grapevines festooning the trees, so much so that they called the new land “Vinland.” The sobriquet was appropriate: except for China, more species of wild grape (twenty to twenty-five) are found in North America than anywhere else in the world, and some have a high sugar content. Nevertheless, except for the occasional grapeseed find, no decisive archaeological or chemical evidence has yet been discovered to demonstrate that any native peoples collected the wild grape for food, let alone domesticated the plant or made wine from its fruit. Even when extensive tracts of forests were cleared around A.D. 800 to grow maize in the American heartland and eventually all the way to the eastern seaboard, it was not used to make corn chicha.

  What accounts for this absence of alcohol, so much at odds with the rest of
the Americas? Perhaps the Aztec aversion to excessive drinking of alcoholic beverages (at least among the general populace), already evident in their aboriginal home in northwestern Mexico, was shared by some of their neighbors. The Pueblo people, for example, grew maize and were surrounded by groups who drank corn chicha, but they eschewed the beverage (unless ongoing analyses from Chaco Canyon in New Mexico are borne out). Except for tobacco, they also avoided other drugs, including the omnipresent mescal beans (Sophora secundiflora) and roots of Datura stramonium (also known as jimsonweed or thorn apple).

  Yet the Pueblo people did play flutes and drums at Pecos Pueblo, just east of Santa Fe, and we know such instruments are often tied to celebrations with alcoholic beverages in other parts of the world. In the period between about A.D. 1200 and 1600, what are described as “ceremonial caches” of as many as twelve bird-bone flutes were deposited in rooms and burials of the large complex. Like the many flutes from the Old World, dating as far back as 35,000 B.P., most of those from Pecos were made from a specific bone: the forewing (ulna) of the whooping crane, golden eagle, and red-tailed hawk (and in one case a turkey leg bone). The four or five holes of the Pecos flutes had been carefully drilled, using guidelines, as elsewhere. Could these flutes, so similar to those from Jiahu (see chapter 2), hark back to the time that the first Americans crossed over from East Asia?

  It could be that tobacco (Nicotiania spp.), which grows everywhere in the Americas and which Native Americans used from an early date as their principal means of communicating with the gods and as a social lubricant, filled the niche that alcoholic beverages occupied in other cultures. Tobacco was chewed and sucked, given as an enema, smoked from long pipes in the shapes of eagles and condors and decorated with their feathers, and snorted through bird bones or from trays from which the animal totem stared back at the reveler. Tobacco smoke was viewed as the “proper food of the gods,” and as it ascended to the heavens, like a bird, a shamanistic priest or medicine man was transported into an ecstatic state by flooding his body and brain with nicotine.

  Grapes and maize were only part of the natural bounty that North Americans could have exploited for making a fermented beverage if they had been so inclined. Many species of trees—maple, box elder, white walnut, and birch—produce a sugary sap in the spring, which can be tapped by piercing the outer bark. The Indians concentrated the resulting liquid by dropping red-hot stones into a bark or wood vessel full of the sap, or by repeatedly freezing it and removing the ice. The syrup would have been an ideal starting material for an alcoholic beverage, but the Native Americans apparently used it only as a sweetener and medicine.

  The question of why the North American natives lived such a teetotaling existence, when other New World peoples quaffed quantities of alcoholic beverages, can be approached in another way. If the first Americans all trace their ancestry back to northern and central Siberia, then a fermented-beverage tradition might well have been brought across Beringia, down the coast, and into the interior. But Siberia, being singularly short on high-sugar resources, appears to have lacked such a tradition.

  In place of any alcoholic beverage, the Siberian peoples engaged in shamanistic practices based on the hallucinogenic fly agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria). When European explorers finally braved the frigid tundra of Siberia, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, they recorded how the shaman often dressed in a deer costume with antlers, like the Palaeolithic creature depicted in Les Trois Frères cave (see chapter 1). After consuming the mushroom, he would beat on a large drum, whose monotonous repetition reinforced the effects of the active hallucinogenic compounds (ibotenic acid and muscimole) and took him into the ancestral dreamtime. The mushroom was administered in various ways. Women might roll dried and diced pieces around in their mouths to make quids that were presented to the shaman. The fungus might be decocted and mixed with berry juice. The shaman might even consume the mushroom secondhand by drinking the urine of a deer or human who had already ingested it. The active agents, which are not metabolized by the mammalian body, can be recycled, as it were.

  Fortunately for the early human migrants from Siberia, A. muscaria also grows in North America. In the Mackenzie Mountains of northwestern Canada and along the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan, Athabascan and Ojibwa (Ahnishinaubeg) people still use the mushroom in ceremonies very similar to those of the Siberian shamanistic cults. Could these be the remnants of Ice Age traditions, passed down from generation to generation since humans first entered the New World? If so, then as they traveled farther south, out of the range of this hallucinogenic mushroom, they had all the more reason to begin experimenting with plants never before encountered—teosinte, cacti, and fruits like cacao—and converting them into alternative mind-bending fermented beverages.

  EIGHT

  AFRICA SERVES UP ITS MEADS, WINES, AND BEERS

  OUR EXPLORATION OF FERMENTED BEVERAGES on planet Earth brings us full circle back to Africa. This is where our forebears of one hundred thousand years ago first spread out from the Great Rift Valley to other parts of the continent and then across the Sinai land bridge or the Bab el-Mandeb to Asia, eventually opening themselves up to the whole world.

  Many Westerners imagine Africa as a continent of impenetrable jungles, lush grasslands, rolling sand dunes, and the occasional snow-capped mountain like Kilimanjaro. Its peoples present a bewildering picture of diverse cultures and languages. My initial impression of Africa was little different: I was struck by its awesomeness, even dread, especially after reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. His novella, inspired by a steamboat trip up the Congo River in his early youth, is saturated with the darkest images of man and nature. The river is likened to a huge, sinister snake, which takes the narrator into an unfathomable world of vegetation and humanity gone wild, with the incessant pounding of drums, accentuated periodically by hideous screams in the night. It creates an impression of traveling back to a prehistoric Earth, to a primeval forest inhabited by the earliest humans. Savage hunters, clad only in leopard skins or sporting antelope horns on their heads, and equally magnificent women, adorned in glittering metal jewelry and vivid attire, face the wilderness with unbridled pride and mystery. Shriveled human heads, hanging from poles, are no less terrifying than the moral abyss of the Western ivory hunters. This existential and natural quagmire of Conrad’s Africa, to which T. S. Eliot fittingly refers in the epigraph of his poem “The Hollow Men,” seems to swallow up everything in its wake.

  Many of us still harbor similar sentiments about Africa today, which are reinforced when we hear of the scourges of AIDS and other diseases, families on the edge of starvation, and Tutsis and Hutus killing one another in Rwanda and Burundi. Closer examination, however, reveals another Africa. Ebullient strains can be heard in its uplifting music and detected in its mesmerizing dances and colorful ceremonies. Its people show a facility for language, as might be expected for the continent that gave rise to our species: some two thousand distinct languages are spoken, according to a recent estimate. Pottery was likely independently invented here around 6000 B.C., at about the same time as in the Near East. Native cereals (e.g., finger and bulrush millets, fonio, and teff) and tubers (yam and nut grass) were cultivated about the same time and eventually domesticated. Many of these advances were probably fueled by a desire for alcoholic beverages. Yet our “first home” in sub-Saharan Africa, which displays so much human ingenuity, was ironically cut off from the outside world for millennia by geographic barriers.

  YELLOW GOLD

  Until the domestication of the camel made it possible for humans to cross large tracts of desert, the main route in and out of Africa was along the Nile River, the longest river in the world, which traverses 6,700 kilometers, half the length of the continent. Bordered by vast stretches of desert today, the verdant ribbons of the White and the Blue Nile wend their way from their headwaters in the Great Rift Valley and the highlands of Ethiopia, with their high concentrations of hominid and early human fossil remains
, to Khartoum, where the rivers meet. From here, the Nile River proper flows through Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea.

  Map 4. Africa. The basic ingredients of fermented beverages in the “homeland” of humanity included honey (especially in the Great Rift Valley), barley and wheat (especially in the Nile River Valley), sorghum and millet (especially in the Sahel and Sahara Desert), palm sap, and many other fruits (e.g., Ziziphus), root crops, and grasses. These drinks were often mixed with “medicinal” herbs, tree resins, and other additives (including the incense tree and iboga shrub). Some indigenous cereals were probably domesticated as early as the Neolithic period. Ideas and technology about making fermented beverages (e.g., mashing installations for grains in Egypt and Burkina Faso) flowed between the Nile River and West Africa.