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Pre-Incan Metallurgy Discovered Charles Q. Choi Special to LiveScience Thu Apr 19, 9:50 AM ET Metals found in lake mud in the central Peruvian Andes have revealed the first evidence for pre-Colonial metalsmithing there. These findings illustrate a way that archaeologists can recreate the past even when looters have destroyed the valuable artifacts that would ordinarily be relied upon to reveal historical secrets. For instance, the new research hints at a tax imposed on local villages by ancient Inca rulers to force a switch from production of copper to silver. Pre-Colonial bronze artifacts have previously been found in the central...

Elite Women Made Beer in Pre-Incan Culture Robert Roy Britt Mon Nov 14, 6:00 PM ET An ancient brewery from a vanished empire was staffed by elite women who were selected for their beauty or nobility, a new study concludes. The finding adds to other evidence that women played a more crucial role in ancient Andean societies than history books have stated. It may also in some ways reflect modern drinking traditions in the Andean mountains, where women get drunk as much as men, researchers say. The brewery, on a mountaintop in southern Peru, cranked out hundreds of gallons of...

MIAMI (Reuters) - U.S. researchers have unearthed what they say may be the oldest known brewery in the Andes, a pre-Incan plant at least 1,000 years old that could produce drinks for hundreds of people at one sitting. The University of Florida said on Thursday that its archeologists and researchers from the Field Museum in Chicago found the brewery at Cerro Baul, a mountaintop religious center of the Wari empire that ruled what is now Peru hundreds of years before the Incas. At least 20 ceramic, 10- to 15-gallon (38- to 57-litre) vats were found at the site some 8,000...