I believe a vast field of research has already been conducted by eminent scholars. The hypothesis is currently being explored.
Posted on 04/09/2005 12:01:37 AM PDT by nickcarraway
While the modern era has a fondness for the business lunch, the ancient world viewed the feast as an important arena of political action. Yet, new research in the April 2005 issue of Current Anthropology suggests that the story of how the food and drink arrived to the table is just as critical to our understanding of the past as the social behaviors at the table.
Since alcoholic beverages were liberally consumed at many of these feasts (often occurring over several days), a sponsor often faced the daunting problem of assembling prodigious amounts of alcohol in the weeks preceding a feast. In this paper, researchers from the University of California at Santa Barbara, consider certain traditional methods for making maize beer, barley and emmer wheat beer, rice beer, agave wine, and grape wine from a variety of regions around the world. By exploring the recipes used to make each of these beverages, they demonstrate how details of each drink's manufacture, such as shelf life, plant maturation, and labor crunches, offered challenges and opportunities to sponsors who attempted to organize their mass-production.
They argue that "differences in the operational chains of food and beverages helped to shape feasting strategies by presenting both diverse processing challenges and unusual opportunities."
Until now, archaeological investigations of feasting have tended to focus on the political ramifications of the event itself. This study is unique in its focus on the production struggles that lead up to the days of a feast, suggesting that these operational chains were significant to understanding the organization of the political economies of ancient societies.
Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate species. Communicating across the subfields, the journal features papers in a wide variety of areas, including social, cultural, and physical anthropology as well as ethnology and ethnohistory, archaeology and prehistory, folklore, and linguistics.
Jennings, Justin, Kathleen L. Antrobus, Sam J. Atencio, Erin Glavich, Rebecca Johnson, German Loffler, and Christine Luu. "'Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood': Alcohol Production, Operational Chains, and Feasting in the Ancient World." Current Anthropology 46:2.
Think Babelfish would make some sense of this?
"Getting enough beer and pizza for Superbowl Sunday was a real pain before Domino's and Budweiser."
Water treatment plants until the 20th century consisted of a still and some barrels. Alcoholic beverages were the safest outlets to get your daily supply of potable water, especially in cities of old world.
Not saying it was good since people generally fell dead around between 30-35 years old, just saying alcohol was safest water supply in a world of open sewers, horse droppings, malaria, yellow fever. typhoid, and dead animal and human corpses rotting in the streets, streams, rivers, and lakes.
One of the guys I work with is very active in the Masons and the Shriners. Laying in mass quantities of alcohol and meat is a very important part of his work for these organizations. He's the party man, the one who roasts entire pigs and hundreds of chickens, the one who sets up the Guy's Nights Out with cigars and fancy booze, and so forth. And he gets the bulk of his business from his contacts with these organizations.
I suspect that this type of social structure has been around for many thousands of years.
I believe a vast field of research has already been conducted by eminent scholars. The hypothesis is currently being explored.
Plus they kept having taste tests to see if it was beer yet.
Come to think of it, if Teddy ever visited the New Guinea highlands, he could make an entire tribe very happy.
Yup. Also, in the Middle Ages, people drank ale and strong beer from lead goblets. The combination was so toxic that they sometimes mistook these people for being dead. Since they used to re-use coffins back then, they discoverd about 25% of all coffins had scratch marks on the inside. They were burying people who were not yet dead.
Today, when we lay out the body of someone who dies, is this were the term "a wake" comes from?
just sit around watching all those drunk Romans take headers into the fountains.....
A wake was to give the person a chance to wake up. When he started smelling bad he was deemed dead enough to bury.
....for a year!
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Actually if they lived past childhood, they had a good chance that they would make it to their fifties, even sixties. Life expectancy formulas don't factor out childhood deaths. Higher infant mortality rates show up as lower life expectancies.
I have a feeling that if you could make it to 20 back then, you would be immune to almost everything.
I'm going to order an emergency exit option for my coffin - just in case. I'm thinking a quick release lever like the ones they use in the jet fighters for when they want to eject.
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