- McGovern, Patrick E.
Uncorking the Past.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-520-25379-7.
-
While a variety of animals are attracted to and consume
the alcohol in naturally fermented fruit, only humans
have figured out how to promote the process, producing
wine from fruit and beer from cereal crops. And they've
been doing it since at least the Neolithic period: the
author discovered convincing evidence of a fermented beverage
in residues on pottery found at the
Jiahu site in China,
inhabited between 7000 and 5800 B.C.
Indeed, almost every human culture which had access to fruits or
grains which could be turned into an alcoholic beverage did so,
and made the production and consumption of spirits an important
part of their economic and spiritual life. (One puzzle is why
the North American Indians, who lived among an abundance of
fermentable crops never did—there are theories that
tobacco and hallucinogenic mushrooms supplanted alcohol for
shamanistic purposes, but basically nobody really knows.)
The author is a pioneer in the field of biomolecular archæology
and head of the eponymous laboratory at the
University
of Pennsylvania Museum of Archæology and Anthropology;
in this book takes us on a tour around the world and across the
centuries exploring, largely through his own research and that
of associates, the history of fermented beverages in a variety of
cultures and what we can learn from this evidence about how they
lived, were organised, and interacted with other societies.
Only in recent decades has biochemical and genetic analysis progressed
to the point that it is possible not only to determine from some
gunk found at the bottom of an ancient pot not only that it was
some kind of beer or wine, but from what species of fruit and grain
it was produced, how it was prepared and fermented, and what additives
it may have contained and whence they originated. Calling on
experts in related disciplines such as palynology (the study of
pollen and spores, not of the Alaskan politician), the author is able
to reconstruct the economics of the bustling wine trade across the
Mediterranean (already inferred from shipwrecks carrying large numbers
of casks of wine) and the diffusion of the ancestral cultivated grape
around the world, displacing indigenous grapes which were less productive
for winemaking.
While the classical period around the Mediterranean is pretty much
soaked in wine, and it'd be difficult to imagine the Vikings and
other North Europeans without their beer and grogs, much less was
known about alcoholic beverages in China, South America, and Africa.
Once again, the author is on their trail, and not only reports upon
his original research, but also attempts, in conjunction with micro-brewers
and winemakers, to reconstruct the ancestral beverages of yore.
The biochemical anthropology of booze is not exactly a crowded
field, and in this account written by one of its leaders, you
get the sense of having met just about all of the people
pursuing it. A great deal remains to be learnt—parts
of the book read almost like a list of potential Ph.D. projects
for those wishing to follow in the author's footsteps. But that's
the charm of opening a new window into the past: just as DNA
and other biochemical analyses revolutionised the understanding of
human remains in archæology, the arsenal of modern analytical
tools allows reconstructing humanity's almost universal companion
through the ages, fermented beverages, and through them, uncork the
way in which those cultures developed and interacted.
A paperback edition will be published in
December 2010.
October 2010 