Uncorking the Past Read online

  Hajji Firuz provides our first glimpse of Neolithic wine, but as yet, beer or other fermented beverages have not been confirmed this early. Very much, however, depends on the selection of pottery vessels for analysis, and thus far attention has been directed mainly toward possible wine containers. We need another Ginny Badler to sort through the Neolithic pottery corpus and pick out the potential vessels used to make beer, mead, and other fermented beverages.

  A PRIESTLY CLASS BEGINS TO EMERGE

  The fertile foothills of Iran’s Azerbaijan province, where Hajji Firuz is located, merge with the Taurus Mountains, north of the Mesopotamian plain, in eastern Turkey, or Anatolia. Here, in 1983, a tidal shift in Neolithic studies occurred at the site of Nevali Çori, set in the starkly beautiful limestone terrain of the upper Euphrates River valley. To look at the barren hills today, with only a thread of luxuriant vegetation along the river in the distance, it is easy to understand why archaeologists did not venture into the area sooner. The impending construction of the Atatürk Dam changed all that. Teams from the University of Heidelberg’s Academy of Sciences, led by Harald Hauptmann, and the Archaeological Museum of Sanliurfa moved in to help in the salvage effort before the lake behind the dam rose to obliterate all signs of ancient human occupation.

  The excavators were astounded by the finds uncovered at Nevali Çori, dating to the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic period from about 8500 to 6000 B.C. Two nearly square buildings, one on top of the other and about sixteen meters on a side, had been carefully constructed by laying out lines of tall, monolithic pillars of limestone formed into a T shape at the top. Stone benches, with pillars built in, lined the walls. In the latest structure, two bent arms with clasped hands had been carved in low relief on the two central pillars. One could almost imagine the pillars as a silent assembly of human onlookers to events in the buildings. The living Neolithic people would have observed from the benches. Never before had monumental architecture on such an elaborate scale been found at an early Neolithic site.

  The buildings each had a niche inset into a wall, and in the latest phase, a strange sculpture had been built into or buried in the back wall of the niche: a large fragment of a bald head, with projecting ears and a phallus-like snake slithering up the back of the head. The face was unfortunately broken away, so the figure’s sex is uncertain. Although broken at the neck, it appeared to have been part of a larger life-size figure, which Hauptmann conjectured had originally stood on the podium in front of the earlier phase’s niche. That niche also yielded a limestone sculpture of a large raptor.

  There were no signs that the earlier building had been destroyed and then rebuilt. Rather, the earlier building was filled in intentionally, ceremonially buried as it were, along with eleven more stone sculptures. One of the most remarkable pieces deposited in the fill was a three-dimensional pillar like a totem pole, which shows two figures back to back, arms and legs entwined, each with a large raptor standing on its head. The long, plaited tresses of the heads suggest that the figures are female. The bust of another coiffed statue is held firmly by talons. Two birds face one another on yet another piece. Bird and human appear to have been merged on a fourth example, with arms or wings folded in front of the body; its projecting head and flat facial features are owl-like and eerily reminiscent of a Modigliani painting.

  Clearly, the Nevali Çori buildings were no ordinary residences. They are not unique in southeastern Turkey. The nearby site of Göbekli Tepe, from an even earlier phase of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, has been the focus of Hauptmann’s colleague Klaus Schmidt. Located in the so-called Golden Triangle, bordered by the Euphrates, Tigris, and Balikh rivers, the site looks out across the fertile Harran plain from a high hill. The buildings uncovered there have T-shaped pillars that are even more ornately decorated than those at Nevali Çori. Lions leap out from atop the pillars. Snakes undulate up and down. Foxes leap. Boars charge. Ducks flock together. On one pillar, we see an assemblage of three animals—an aurochs (wild ox), fox, and crane—going from top to bottom: the narrow side of the pillar depicts only the horns of the aurochs. Humans are also shown: a sculpture of a female head in the clasp of raptor talons is similar to the one found at Nevali Çori, and an incised slab graphically depicts a naked female, legs spread apart, and penetrated by a penis.

  The sculptures at both sites provide the clues to the original functions of the structures in which they were found. We have seen that shamans elsewhere associated their access to otherworldly realms with high-flying birds and their songs and mating dances. Spectacular later Anatolian drinking vessels, with long, beak-shaped spouts, probably perpetuated this tradition. Six millennia following the Neolithic, remnants of some peculiar association between birds and humans (females in this instance) can be seen in depictions of the great mother goddess of the Phrygians, Matar, who is shown holding a raptor or enveloped in its feathers. In short, the structures at Nevali Çori and Göbekli Tepe were cult buildings, representing one of the first glimmerings of an organized religion in the Middle East.

  WHAT WERE THEY DRINKING AND SACRIFICING?

  If we grant cultic status to the unusual structures at Nevali Çori and Göbekli Tepe, we are still left with questions about whether any fermented beverage figured in the rituals. Two smaller artifacts, a stone goblet and bowl, from the Nevali Çori excavations suggest that it did. The carved goblet depicts a male and female dancing with a Euphrates tortoise. A festive occasion also seems to be represented on the bowl, which depicts three leaping figures, open-mouthed as if belting out a song. I had seen similar scenes (minus the tortoise) on Neolithic jars from Georgia in the Caucasus, and in those instances, the figures appeared to be dancing beneath a grape arbor. An association with grape wine was strongly implied, as Georgia was one of the ancient world’s great wine cultures. Preliminary chemical results show that Neolithic jars from Shulaveris-Gora and Khramis-Didi-Gora once held wine.

  Figure 9. Extraordinary limestone sculptures adorned the “temples” at Göbekli Tepe, ca. 9000 B.C. This T-shaped pillar realistically portrays a wild ox, fox, and crane. Photograph courtesy of Professor Dr. Klaus Schmidt, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Berlin.

  Figure 10. Carved bowl or goblet in limestone from Nevali Çori, ca. 8000 B.C., height 13.5 cm. The exuberant dancing scene of two humans and a tortoise on the exterior of this vessel is unique. Photograph courtesy of Professor Dr. Harald Hauptmann, Euphrates Archive, Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften.

  Stone bowls and goblets similar to those from Nevali Çori have been found at Göbekli Tepe and other key sites throughout the region, including Çayönü, where researchers have found a long temporal sequence of monumental cult buildings that were ritually buried by filling them with soil after they went out of use. The evidence from Körtik and Hallan Çemi, both situated farther east along tributaries of the Tigris River, is of particular interest because of the quantity and early date of their vessels.

  Hallan Çemi, being excavated under the direction of Michael Rosenberg of the University of Delaware, represents an even earlier phase of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic than Göbekli Tepe. Its cult buildings were smaller than those at Göbekli, less well made, and circular. The many fragments of stone bowls and goblets found there are often plain, but when decorated by incising, they feature the same motifs—especially stylized snakes and birds—as at Körtik. Excavation at Körtik, carried out by Vecihi Özkaya of Dicle (Tigris) University, has yielded bowls and goblets only from burials. The vessels number in the hundreds: in addition to the animal motifs, many feature intricate geometric designs. The juxtaposition of birds and snakes, as well as the Nevali Çori dancing tortoise, on many of the vessels also points to a tiered worldview with lower and upper realms, which is characteristic of shamanistic thought. Recently the body of an elderly and disabled woman, who has been identified as a shaman, was found buried with more than fifty complete tortoise shells and the remains of a wild boar, eagle, cow, leopard, and two martens in a cave in the western Galilee regio
n of Israel. Could it be that this special interment, dated to ca. 12,000 B.P. and belonging to the Natufian culture (see chapter 6), is a forerunner of the motifs seen on the vessels and pillars of eastern Turkey or of the incised tortoise shells deposited with the “shamanistic” musicians at Jiahu in China several thousand years later?

  The Hallan Çemi and Körtik bowls and goblets were carved from chlorite, a clay mineral with highly adsorbent properties. Such vessels led on to the earliest pottery, beginning around 6000 B.C., which included larger jars and sieves, ideal for processing and storing wine, and which were sometimes decorated with clay appliqués in the form of grape clusters, like the Georgian jars.

  On my trip to eastern Turkey in 2004, Vecihi Özkaya made available to me two of the Körtik chlorite vessels for analysis. We were extremely fortunate that copious amounts of ancient organic compounds were retained in pores of the chlorite. Our analyses, still in progress, show very good evidence, based on the infrared results and spot tests for tartaric acid, that the original contents of these vessels were grape wine, not barley beer. More definitive liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry–mass spectrometry (LC–MS–MS) analysis is needed to verify this result.

  TO THE HEADWATERS OF THE TIGRIS AND EUPHRATES

  Besides securing stone and pottery samples for analysis, my trip to eastern Turkey had another goal. You might say that we were looking for the vinicultural Garden of Eden. The eastern Taurus, Caucasus, and northern Zagros mountains have long been considered the world center of the Eurasian grape: this is the area where the species shows its greatest genetic variation and consequently where it might have been first domesticated. It is also becoming increasingly clear, as we pursue our combined archaeological and chemical investigations, that the world’s first wine culture—one in which viniculture, comprising both viticulture and winemaking, came to dominate the economy, religion, and society as a whole—emerged in this upland area by at least 7000 B.C.

  Once established, the wine culture gradually radiated across time and space to become a dominant economic and social force throughout the region and later across Europe in the millennia to follow. The end result over the past ten thousand years or so, since the end of the Ice Age, is that the Eurasian grape now accounts for some ten thousand varieties and 99 percent of the world’s wine. Even though North America and East Asia have many more native grape species, some with very high sugar contents, there is as yet, amazingly, no evidence that they were domesticated before modern times.

  We were interested in finding out whether there was a unique event that precipitated domestication in this core area. This one-time, one-place proposition has been referred to as the Noah hypothesis, an allusion to the biblical tradition that the patriarch’s first goal, after his ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, was to plant a vineyard and make wine (Genesis 8:4 and 9:20).

  Although eastern Turkey today might not appear to be conducive to viticulture, the recent excavations painted a much different picture during the Neolithic period. Precipitation levels were higher in the period immediately succeeding the Ice Age, and because the Taurus Mountains form part of the Trans-Asiatic orogenic belt, a region of intense geologic activity today and in the past, the soils are rich in all the essential metals, minerals, and other nutrients needed by grapes as well as by numerous other wild fruits, nuts, and cereals.

  The calcareous hills and valleys of this upland region are generally characterized by an iron-rich red loam known as terra rossa. This soil is often rocky, encouraging good drainage and root development, and contains enough clay to retain moisture through the dry season. Its slightly alkaline pH and low humus content are also good for grapes. Even if these conditions were ripe for exploitation, the question is whether early humans first domesticated the Eurasian grape somewhere in the Taurus Mountains and began to make wine here.

  In collaboration with colleagues in Europe and the United States, we have applied modern DNA analysis to resolve this question. We sequenced specific regions (microsatellites) of the nuclear and chloroplast genome of modern wild and domesticated grape plants from Turkey, Armenia, and Georgia and carefully compared these results with those from European and Mediterranean cultivars. We have already shown that Middle Eastern grapes probably derive from common ancestors and that four Western European varieties—Chasselas, Nebbiolo, Pinot, and Syrah—are closely related to a group of Georgian cultivars and might well have some ancient Georgian ancestors. The extraction of ancient DNA from seeds or other parts of the plant, which should eventually provide more direct evidence, is being pursued.

  Our search for wild vines in eastern Turkey turned out to be a high adventure. Together with my associates from the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland (José Vouillamoz) and the University of Ankara (Gökhan Söylemezolu and Ali Ergul), we traveled the dusty highroads and byways in our Department of Agriculture Land Cruiser during the spring of 2004. One dramatic setting for our collecting was in a deeply cut ravine below the famous site of Nemrut Daghi, where the first-century B.C. ruler Antiochus I Epiphanes had statues of himself in the company of the gods hewn out of limestone on a mountaintop 2,150 meters high. Other promising areas were along a river valley cutting through the Taurus Mountains around Bitlis and Siirt, and along the Euphrates River north of Sanliurfa, at Halfeti.

  We traveled all the way to the headwaters of the Tigris River, just downstream from Lake Hazar and the city of Elazi. Here the river cuts through one of the most metallurgically important areas in the ancient Near East, Maden (Turkish for “mine”), and an area that is still tectonically active. Maden is only about twenty-five kilometers from the important Neolithic site of Çayönü. Fortunately the Earth’s crust was quiet, but in my eagerness to reach a particularly enticing grapevine clinging to a bank of the river, I almost fell into the raging torrent of the upper Tigris. But for the sure hands of my colleague Ali, I might not be telling this story.

  Our risks paid off when we found a hermaphroditic wild plant which was positioned between a wild male and female vine, exactly the situation that an early viticulturalist would have needed to observe and select for. What makes the domesticated Eurasian grapevine so desirable is that it is hermaphroditic: male stamens and female pistils are located together in the same flowers on the plant, whereas for the wild variety, male and female flowers occur on separate plants. The proximity of the sexual organs on the hermaphroditic plants ensures the production of much more fruit on a predictable basis. This self-fertilizing plant could then be selected for desirable traits, such as sweeter, juicier fruit or thinner skins, and cloned by propagation of branches, buds, or roots.

  The hermaphrodites, representing a mutation, account for about 5 to 7 percent of the wild-vine population. Still, it would have taken some pretty sharp eyes to pick out just those plants and domesticate them, as the sexual organs of the flowers are microscopic.

  Domestication of the grapevine assumes that humans had discovered how to propagate it artificially, as growing it from seed results in unpredictable characteristics. The natural habit of the wild grapevine also doesn’t lend itself to making the best wine grapes or easy harvesting. Left to itself, it grows high up in trees, shading out competing plants and producing fruit appealing to animals, especially birds who spread its seed, but not necessarily to humans, as it can be very sour.

  It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Neolithic viticulturalists developed a layering method (provenage) to propagate the grapevine from the root and thus train it to grow up a nearby tree. The idea of propping up vines with artificial supports might well have been suggested by vines growing up trees. Early viticulturalists might have also started training the vine’s height and shape, which would make gathering the fruit a lot easier.

  To date, our DNA studies, based on the samples we collected in eastern Turkey and the Caucasus, appear to support the Noah hypothesis, but more work is needed. Samples are needed from other parts of the Middle East, especially Azerbaijan in modern Iran, and this remains
a difficult region to work in. If the hermaphroditic gene itself, a single region of the genome that accounts for the development of both male and female organs in flowers on the same plant, could be isolated, then we could target that gene for analysis in ancient and modern material. Someday soon we will have the answer.

  INTO THE BLACK MOUNTAINS

  Beer was probably not far behind wine in fueling the Neolithic Revolution. On a tour of Göbekli Tepe with its excavator, Klaus Schmidt, Stephen Mithen of the University of Reading observed that religious ideology might have driven human settlement at the site, more than any economic advantages gained from domesticated plants and animals. Inverting the usual formula invoked to explain the Neolithic, Mithen proposed that the large number of laborers who were needed to construct the cult buildings had to be fed (and, I would add, had to have their thirst quenched), thus creating a need for reliable local sources of food.

  In response to Mithen’s idea, Schmidt pointed to some mountains about thirty kilometers away: the Karacada Range, or Black Mountains. This volcanic area of black basaltic boulders is covered with dense stands of wild einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum ssp. boeoticum). Certainly the area is awash in luxuriant grasses in the spring, when our intrepid team of grape explorers went in search of wild vines there and came back empty-handed. Wheat has the upper hand in these hills.