The Great Beer Experiment
The History and Archaeology of Beer
Recent chemical analyses of residues in pottery jars from the Neolithic village of Jiahu in Northern China by Patrick McGovern revealed that a mixed fermented beverage of rice, honey and fruit was being produced as early as 9,000 years ago. Evidence for the production of beer in the Middle East has long been known – Calcium Oxalate, the principal component of an insoluble deposit known as beerstone was found on the inner surfaces of fermentation vessels at Godin Tepe (late fourth Millennium BC) in the Zagros Mountains in modern day Iran. A stamp seal from Tepe Gawra, a site near Mosul, Iraq dated to 4000 BC, shows two figures drinking beer using traditional straws and container. At Hierakonpolis near Luxor, Jeremy Geller interpreted a site known as HK24A (3100-2890 BC), as a brewery. The world’s earliest written recipe, a Sumerian cuneiform tablet dating to 1800 BC, describes the brewing of beer.
Large-scale grain processing in the Neolithic in Britain is hinted at by thousands of charred cereal grains found at Balbridie in Scotland. At Ashgrove, in Scotland, archaeologists found evidence of a mixed meadowsweet/lime, a possible mead drink. Compelling evidence for alcohol consumption in early Scotland comes from Perthshire, where Gordon Barclay discovered a ‘black greasy material’ in a food vessel and pollen analysis indicated that it represented a cereal-based meadowsweet-flavoured drink.
For more information read the Autumn issue of Archaeology Ireland (after which we will post the full article here).