From: kreckman@cbmvax.commodore.com (Steve Kreckman)
Newsgroups: alt.beer
Subject: Ancient beer
Date: 5 Nov 92 13:55:13 GMT
Reply-To: kreckman@cbmvax.commodore.com (Steve Kreckman)
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA

The following article on the origins of beer is in today's _Philadelphia
Inquirer_:

CHEMICAL ANALYSIS PUTS A HEAD ON THE HISTORY OF BEER
Sumerians brewed it 5,100 years ago. Pottery shards prove it. Sort of like
sifting through empties after a party.

by Jim Detjen - Inquirer Staff Writer

  New frontiers in Science:
  A team of Philadelphia (where else?) researchers has discovered the earliest
known chemical evidence of beer drinking in the world.
  On shards of pottery unearthed in western Iran, they have found residues of
beer brewed at least 5,100 years ago - even before people learned to write. (In
fact, maybe the reason it took them so *long* to learn to write.)
  "This finding shows that beer is a central part of the earliest civilizations"said Patrick McGovern, an archaeological chemist at the University Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.
  "It may have been one of the major incentives that convinced people to settle
down."
  Before then, he said, "the earliest known beer vessel had been found in Eqypt" dating about 4,000 years ago.
  The findings are being announced in today's issue of Nature, a British
scientific journal.
  Virginia Badler, a Haverford resident who is a co-author of today's article,
said the ancient beer was probably sweeter, darker, more nutritious and less
alcoholic than today's beers. It may have been made with dates and honey.
  It was an "everyman's drink," McGovern said, that provided a year-round sourceof food for people in Sumeria, the ancient civilization that sprang up on the
fertile plain formed by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
  "It probably was an essential part of that civilization," said Badler, a 
graduate student at the University of Toronto. "It probably was preferable to
water for those who could get it."
  Badler said that chemically testing residues on ancient plates, cups,
containers and other utensils might make it possible to learn more about the
eating and drinking habits of early civilizations.
  The story of this discovery began in 1988, when Badler was examining about 80
shards of pottery in a storeroom on the sixth floor of the Royal Ontario Museum
in Toronto. She noticed that these shards had slashes on them that looked very
much like lines on ancient Sumerian symbols for beer. She wondered if they
might have been part of a beer jug.
  But it was not until 1990 that she figured out a way to test her hypothesis.
  In that year she published a paper with McGovern and Rudolph Michel, another
university Museum scientist, announcing the world's earliest known wine. Using
chemical tests, they showed that radish stains on the bottom of a 5,000 year old
jug unearthed in Godin Tepe, an archaeological site in central western Iran, 
were wine residues.
  As a result of that discovery, an international conference on the history of
wine was held in California in April 1990. There she met Vernon Singleton, a
scientist at the University of California at Davis. He suggested that it might
be possible to test for beerstone, a beer-making residue, on the shards she had
examined.
  So, she contacted McGovern and Michel at the University Museum and they agreed
to test a pale yellow residue found on grooves on the shards using a simple
chemical analysis known as the Feiglspot test. For comparison, the scientists
also used the test on samples taken from an ancient Egyptian beer container and
modern beer vessel at the Dock Street Brewing Co. in Philadelphia.
  The test confirmed that the residues from each of the vessels contained
calcium oxalate, a major component of beerstone, which settles out during the 
fermentation and storage of beer.
  Badler said the shards were found in the same room where the earliest known
wine vessel had been discovered. Both were unearthed in room 18 of a building 
at Godin Tempe, a community in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, which lies along
a major trading road later known as the Silk Route.
  "It's a strange room with two windows that open out onto a courtyard," Badler
said. "It may have been a distribution room from which soldiers were given beer
as well as stone balls used for slings. These soldiers may have defended
traders moving along the nearby caravan route."
  Both McGovern and Badler said they expected that chemical tests on older
utensils might show that beer drinking existed even earlier than 3,500 to 3,100
B.C., when both the beer and wine containers at Godin Tepe were used.
  "It may now be possible to push back the date of the earliest known beer 
drinking to 8,000 years ago, when the first domesticated barleywas grown," said
Badler.
  McGovern said further chemical tests also might answer the question: "Which
came first - bread or beer?"

- reproduced without permission from The Philadelphia Inquirer November 5, 1992

...nice to know that were participating in such a time-honored tradition :-).
Hope you enjoyed the article.

-- 
| Steve Kreckman                 |  kreckman@cbmvax.commodore.com           | 
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