Uncorking the Past Read online

  TWO

  ALONG THE BANKS OF THE YELLOW RIVER

  I NEVER EXPECTED THAT MY search for the origins of fermented alcoholic beverages would take me to China. After all, I had spent more than twenty years directing an excavation in Jordan and working throughout the Middle East. I took the first step on my journey to China when, serendipitously, I attended a session on ancient pottery at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 1995. There I met Anne Underhill, an archaeologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, who had recently started one of the first American expeditions on the Chinese mainland, after the dry spell of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. She was convinced that fermented beverages were an integral part of the earliest Chinese culture, as discoveries by my laboratory had shown for the Near East. In traditional and modern societies around the world today, alcoholic beverages are important in most adults’ lives, whether as a reward for a hard day’s work or as part of a celebration. Anne believed that as scientific excavation expanded in China, we would learn just how important fermented beverages were to ancient social relations, religious ceremonies, feasts, and festivals there. She proposed that I join her team at the late Neolithic site of Liangchengzhen in Shandong Province and chemically analyze some of the vessels they might uncover.

  ON THE ROAD IN CHINA

  The opportunity to work in China sounded too good to pass up, even if I knew virtually nothing about ancient Chinese civilization and couldn’t read a Chinese character to save myself. I prepared to join Anne’s team during the 1999 season. I also began considering other Chinese sites that might shed light on the history and prehistory of fermented beverages.

  A colleague at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Garman Harbottle, put me in touch with Changsui Wang, professor of archaeometry at China’s prestigious University of Science and Technology. Changsui soon arranged for me to visit leading archaeologists and scientists in Beijing and at sites in the Yellow River basin, where Chinese culture had blossomed. He even accompanied me on overnight train trips, serving as my interpreter and boon companion and introducing me to modern Chinese life and customs—especially its cuisine and alcoholic beverages.

  Banquets were a daily occurrence, and it was my formidable task as the guest of honor to take the first bite of the barbecued or baked fish with my chopsticks. If I successfully secured a piece and steered it into my mouth, I was roundly applauded. I soon discovered that toasts with fermented beverages were also an absolute must at these meals, a tradition with roots in the distant past. We raised our glasses repeatedly to good health and the success of our research. To avoid succumbing to the potent distilled beverages, made from sorghum or millet, I usually requested the milder, aromatic rice wine. After all, I was there to study a period before distillation had been discovered.

  Six weeks of nonstop travel and banqueting led to tight bonds of collegiality that paved the way for getting archaeological samples approved for loan, through customs, and back to my laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. Accomplishing this sort of task in China requires friends in the right places. It also helped to have colleagues who were as enthusiastic as I was in finding out more about ancient Chinese beverages by applying the latest analytical techniques.

  Changsui and I eventually made our way to the metropolis of Zhengzhou, strategically situated along the Yellow River (Huang He), among verdant fields. We met Juzhong Zhang at the downtown branch of the Institute of Archaeology, which housed pottery and other artifacts from his excavations at the Neolithic site of Jiahu, located about 250 kilometers southeast of Zhengzhou.

  At one time, plant and animal domestication were thought of as having begun in the Near East during the Neolithic period and then spread to the rest of the world. These advances started humankind on the path to “civilization,” because food could be provided by a smaller number of people while others were free to pursue other specialized tasks. To be sure, some of the so-called founder plants, including wheat and barley, were brought into cultivation in the Near East, and herd animals, such as sheep and cattle, were first domesticated there.

  Turning established wisdom on its head, China’s “Neolithic Revolution” has now been shown to precede many of the advances in the Near East. If you think about it, humans probably could not have controlled sheep and goats without dogs, and recent DNA evidence points to East Asia as the place where man’s best friend was domesticated, as far back as 14,000 B.P., during the last Ice Age. Domesticated horses, pigs, and chickens probably also trace their ancestry to this part of the world.

  Most important for my purposes, the Chinese began making pottery around 15,000 B.P., some five thousand years before this innovation took hold in the Near East. Pottery not only made it possible to prepare, store, and serve fermented beverages, but it also absorbed them into its pores and helped preserve them for analysis. The plasticity of clay enabled the fashioning of a whole range of pottery shapes, which helped in preparing foods to go with the beverages and ultimately in establishing one of the world’s great cuisines. One delicacy on the Neolithic menu was long, thin pulled noodles. Excavated at the site of Lajia on the upper Yellow River and dated to around 2000 B.C., the well-preserved yellowish noodles, made from foxtail and broomcorn millet (Setaria and Panicum spp.), had been piled high in a bowl, just the way the Chinese consume them today.

  As Juzhong brought Neolithic pottery vessels down from the shelves for me to examine, I was amazed at their elegant, intricately crafted forms. The jars (see plate 3) had high necks with flaring rims and either smoothly rounded bodies or pronounced, sharply angled shoulders. They would have been ideal for storing or serving fermented beverages. Their handles, made by attaching separate pieces of clay, were as varied as any group of Middle Eastern pottery I had seen and were symmetrically placed to enhance their aesthetic appearance as well as to facilitate transporting, storing, and drinking from the vessels.

  The vessels were undoubtedly handmade, constructed by joining and building up coils and slabs of clay. Fine markings along the rims pointed to a final finishing by slow turning, perhaps on a mat. Some jars were covered with a red slip (a thinly applied fine clay fraction), which had been polished to a high sheen. The yellowish and reddish wares were tempered with mineral inclusions, and were well-fired, probably up to around 800°C. The Neolithic jars at Jiahu attested to a high level of technological sophistication and a repertoire of forms that set the pattern in Chinese pottery making for thousands of years to come. Local innovations likely accounted for the manufacturing excellence, as evidenced by eleven pottery kilns thus far excavated at the site.

  When I peered into some of the vessels, I had another surprise. Flakes of a reddish residue covered the bases of the jars and continued up the sides, just as one would expect if they had once held a liquid. A dark material filled the extensive, highly unusual grooving on the interior of another vessel, much like that seen in a jar from Iran that provided the earliest chemical attestation for barley beer in the Middle East (see chapter 3). I was entranced by the prospects of analyzing the Jiahu jars.

  THE WONDERS THAT WERE JIAHU

  Jiahu, in Henan Province of north-central China, is not your ordinary early Neolithic site, which might feature a few scattered hovels, graves, and associated artifacts. At this site in the fertile plains of the Huai River, which merge with the Yellow River basin to the north, three phases of a full-fledged village and adjoining cemetery have so far been uncovered, spanning the period from about 7000 to 5600 B.C.

  Not only have the excavations at Jiahu yielded some of the earliest pottery in China, but they have also found some of the country’s oldest rice. Surprisingly, it is the short-grain variety (Oryza sativa ssp. japonica), which was long believed to have been derived from its more tropical long-grain cousin (ssp. indica) at sites farther south along the Yangzi River. Recent excavation and archaeobotanical analyses have shown, however, that the subspecies are approximately contemp
oraneous. We do not yet know in which direction the genetic influence flowed, or even whether the Neolithic rice was domesticated or wild. At Jiahu, the large quantity of rice found implies that it had already been brought into cultivation there. Moreover, to judge from the animal bones recovered at Jiahu, the inhabitants would have had to take precautions to protect their rice stores from domesticated dogs and pigs, who were romping through the streets and splashing in the mud holes.

  Figure 3. Early Neolithic “musician/shaman” burial (M282) at Jiahu (Henan Province, China), ca. 6200–5600 B.C., showing flutes at his side (indicated by arrows in this photograph), one of which was carefully repaired in antiquity. Two tortoise shells full of pebbles and pottery jars, which likely contained a mixed fermented beverage, were placed near his head. Photograph courtesy J. Zhang, Z. Zhang, and Henan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.

  The Jiahu inhabitants apparently lived well on the abundant resources of their environment, which also included carp, deer, broad beans, and water chestnuts. They also had a penchant for the symbolic and otherworldly. The site has produced what may be the earliest Chinese written characters ever found: an eye sign, a sticklike figure holding a fork-shaped object, and other designs similar to later glyphs for window and the numerals one, two, eight, and ten.

  The Jiahu signs were incised on tortoise shells and bones, anticipating a religious practice of some six millennia later at the great Shang dynasty capital of Anyang and associated principalities along the Yellow River. Dating from ca. 1200 to 1050 B.C., the Shang dynasty “oracle bones” and shells, of which more than one hundred thousand have now been found, were used by religious mediums in rituals to predict and assure a good future for the emperor and the royal house. Drilling and heating the cattle bone or shell created a web of cracks that were interpreted by the diviner. The prognostication, along with the name of the medium, was then recorded on the bone or shell for posterity.

  It is not known what meaning was attached to the shell and bone signs at Jiahu. From a close examination of the graves where they were found, together with accompanying burial goods, we can infer that they are almost certainly related to ritualistic procedures or religious concepts. The inscribed objects are found only in a handful of male graves, out of nearly four hundred burials that have so far been excavated in the cemetery. In several of these burials, the head of the deceased was carefully removed—whether before or after the flesh had decayed is not known—and replaced by six or eight pairs of whole tortoise shells. The jade “death masks” worn by the upper class during the Zhou and Han dynasties of the first millennium B.C. are a distant echo of this tradition.

  In other burials, the tortoise shells are placed alongside the body or near the shoulder, as if they had once been attached to clothing or held in the hand. Many of these shells, including those substituting for the head, contained small, round white and black pebbles, as few as three per shell or stuffed in by the hundreds. The number of stones in each shell might have had some numerological significance. Another possibility is that the shells with their pebbles had been used as rattles by their owners and were subsequently buried with them.

  A good reason for thinking that the shells might originally have been percussion instruments is that some of them were accompanied by what have been called the earliest playable musical instruments in the world. In 1986, Juzhong could hardly believe his eyes when his excavation team found a pair of bone flutes in tomb M282. Each had seven holes carefully drilled at precise intervals in a straight line down the shaft of the bone. They looked exactly like the bamboo flutes still used throughout China to play traditional music, based on a five-note (pentatonic) scale. Nothing like these ancient instruments had ever before been found in a Chinese excavation.

  As each tomb was excavated, additional flutes were found. To date, two dozen complete specimens have been recovered, along with the fragments of another nine. Such exquisite preservation supports the claim that these flutes are the oldest known playable instruments, as the Palaeolithic flutes from Geissenklösterle and Isturitz are too fragmented to produce reliable tones today. The Chinese archaeologists put out a call for an accomplished musician to test the Jiahu flutes. Ning Baosheng, flautist for Beijing’s Central Orchestra of Chinese Music, happily volunteered his services. By using a standard side-mouth embouchure and blowing through one end of the artifact, like playing a recorder, Ning immediately produced a deep, sonorous tone that had not been heard for nine thousand years.

  Figure 4. Juzhong Zhang, excavator of Jiahu, playing the early Neolithic flute of the “musician/shaman” from burial M282 at the site. Photograph courtesy J. Zhang, Z. Zhang, and Henan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.

  The archaeologists and musicians went on to use modern digital recording techniques and computer processing to study a range of flutes from the three archaeological phases. Because no one knows for sure how the instruments were played, and to facilitate matters, simple fingering was used, in which all the holes were closed off simultaneously. That yielded a very precise musical frequency. Then, each hole was uncovered in turn, leaving all the rest covered, and the resulting frequencies recorded. Of course, an expert can produce many more sounds by cross-fingering, varying his or her embouchure, and so forth.

  Multiholed instruments became increasingly popular over the 1,200-year span of the site, and they enabled the production of increasingly complex music. Even the earliest example, a five-hole flute, could produce four tones nearly identical to those in our Western twelve-tone scale. The addition of another hole made it possible for even a beginner to play a pentatonic scale. With seven or eight holes, the possibilities for adding and modifying tones increased, until all the tones of a standard eight-tone major scale could be played by simple fingering.

  The flutes were obviously highly valued in their day. They were very carefully made by smoothing off the ends and surface and laying out guidelines (also seen on the Geissenklösterle and Isturitz flutes) for drilling the holes. When a flute broke, it was carefully repaired, as a valued Stradivarius violin would be today. In one instance, fourteen tiny holes had been drilled to either side of the break and tied off with string. Most of the flutes were found in pairs, one perhaps having served the owner as a backup instrument.

  Amazingly, all the flutes were made exclusively from a specific wing bone, the ulna, of the red-crowned crane (Grus japonensis). From a practical standpoint, a hollow bird bone seems an obvious material for a flute, but perhaps this particular crane’s behavior also inspired the makers. Adorned with snow-white plumage accented in black and red, this crane performs an intricate mating dance, in which a pair of birds bow to one another, leap in the air, extend their wings, and announce their intentions with intense musical calls. The invention might also have been prompted by hearing the sound made when the marrow is extracted from the bone by sucking, and then blowing back into the cavity.

  While it would be fascinating to hear the folk melodies of ancient Jiahu again, possibly evoking the sounds of the red-crowned cranes, the absence of detailed Neolithic writings makes this possibility extremely unlikely. We can, however, be sure that the individuals buried with flutes and rattles played a special role in their community. Their bodies, unlike those of others, were elaborately adorned with imported turquoise and jade jewelry. Yet millstones, awls, and other utilitarian tools also found in their tombs suggest that they were not averse to common labor. The mystery deepens when we consider the strange, fork-shaped bone objects among their burial goods. These have multiple perforations; we can surmise that they might have been strung like a harp, or perhaps they symbolized the “new agriculture” or were a kind of tool of the individuals’ profession (a point I return to below).

  Figure 5. Red-crowned cranes (Grus japonensis) perform their mating dance on the frozen plains of Manchuria. The two dozen flutes from the early Neolithic site of Jiahu were exclusively made from one of the wing bones (the ulna) of this bird. Photograph © by James G. Parker.r />
  THE WORLD’S EARLIEST ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE

  To end this tale of early Neolithic Jiahu by focusing only on its rice, writing, and music would be to ignore the role that a particular alcoholic beverage played in the developments there.

  When Changsui Wang first introduced me to Juzhong Zhang, he put me on the royal road to discovering this beverage and its importance to Neolithic Jiahu society. Juzhong shared his knowledge and his pottery finds, from which we selected sixteen sherds for chemical analysis. They represented a range of jars and jugs that seemed likely to have contained liquids. One large, two-handled jar especially intrigued me; had it been found five thousand years later in the Near East, it could easily have been mistaken for a Canaanite jar, which served as a model for Greek and Roman amphoras used in the vast Mediterranean wine trade (see chapter 6).

  The analyses of such important samples could not be undertaken lightly, so I engaged a group of collaborators in China (including the Beijing-based microbiologist Guangsheng Cheng and archaeobotanist Zhijun “Jimmy” Zhao), Europe (Michael Richards, now in Leipzig), and the United States (Robert Moreau and Alberto Nuñez of the Department of Agriculture, and Eric Butrym, now at Firmenich, Inc.). Using a variety of techniques, including liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS), carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis, and infrared spectrometry, we identified the chemical fingerprints of the principal ingredients in the ancient Jiahu beverage. Slowly but surely, we were homing in on what would turn out to be the world’s earliest known alcoholic beverage.