Beer making foam-mented change: study

Acknowledging the subject could be seen as “a more mirthful rather than serious area of scholarly research,” a team of Canadian archeologists has published a major study arguing beer making was a crucial development in human civilization, fuelling the feasting culture that encouraged the rise of agriculture in the ancient world.

The three Simon Fraser University researchers, led by SFU emeritus professor Brian Hayden, synthesized dozens of studies on the “Natufian” culture that, 10,000 years ago, occupied the region immediately east of the Mediterranean Sea, today’s Middle East. That region, including the fertile lands along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, is long believed to have been the cradle of agriculture, where groups of prehistoric huntergatherers first coalesced in stable, sedentary communities, which grew their own crops to supplement gazelle meat and other sources of food.

The precise point at which wild grains such as barley were domesticated and more systematically exploited for food and alcoholic beverages has long been a contentious issue among archeologists, the Canadian team states in a 50-page study published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.

While the SFU researchers say they haven’t found a “smoking brew pot” providing absolute proof that a thirst for beer drove the Natufian people to become farmers, they “conclude that feasting and brewing very likely provided a key link between increasing ‘complexity’ and the adoption of cereal cultivation.”

Hayden told Postmedia News that “there are lots of implications” of the team’s findings, and that “brewing was just part of the picture” during humanity’s pivotal shift to settled, stable communities with enough food supplies to foster more complex cultural developments.

But beer-making, he added, was one factor “that we think was important in making feasts such powerful tools for attracting people and getting them committed to producing surpluses.”