National Post (National Edition)
Beer crucial to civilization, researchers find
Important for agriculture: Canadian 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 that argues 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 emeritus professor Brian Hayden, synthesized dozens of studies on the Natufian culture that, 10,000 years ago, occupied the area 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. Groups of prehistoric hunter-gatherers first coalesced here 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, says the Canadian team in a 50-page study published in the Journal of Archaeological Method & Theory.
While the SFU researchers say they have not found a “smoking brew pot” providing absolute proof 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 ‘ com-
Domestication of cereals was for the purposes of brewing beer
plexity’ and the adoption of cereal cultivation.”
Prof. Hayden said “there are lots of implications” of the team’s findings. “[B]rewing 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 “we think was important in making feasts such powerful tools for attracting people and getting them committed to producing surpluses.”
A recent New York Times article briefly summarized the Canadian study in the headline, “How beer gave us civilization.”
But the SFU archeologists make clear imbibers of today’s mass-marketed and craft beers might not recognize the substances produced by the Natufians.
“Beers made in traditional tribal or village societies generally are quite different from modern industrial beers,” they say.
“Traditional beers often have quite low alcohol contents (2% to 4%), include lactic acid fermentation giving them a tangy and sour taste, contain various additives such as honey or fruits, and vary in viscosity from clear liquids, to soupy mixtures with suspended solids, to pastes.”
But whether the brewed beverage flowed easily, contained lumps or had a greenish tinge that would have been well suited for last weekend’s St. Patrick’s Day parties, the researchers assert it was possible “the domestication of cereals was for the purposes of brewing beer rather than for basic subsistence purposes.”
Among the pieces of archeological evidence they point to are large, elaborately carved stone vessels unearthed at Natufian dig sites.
The huge bowls, Prof. Hayden and his co-authors suggest, may have been used to brew beer for feasts that helped to organize social hierarchies and reinforced the benefits of domesticating wild plants to produce reliable harvests.
The “astonishing” amount of effort involved in creating the vessels suggests they were “possibly only used in feasting contexts and possibly for brewing,” the researchers state.
“Brewing beer is a laborious and time-consuming process that requires surplus amounts of cereals and control over significant labour. It is not something which is undertaken by families of meagre means nor by individuals for frivolous purposes such as ephemeral personal whims or pleasures …
“[T]he technological and technical prerequisites of brewing were well established during Natufian times.”