Uncorking the Past Page 6

  In the residues, which were obtained by extracting the pottery with methanol and chloroform, the same chemical compounds kept showing up in one vessel after another. The detection of tartaric acid told us that the likely sources were grapes or hawthorn fruit (Crataegus pinnatifida and cuneata, or, in Chinese, shan zha). Very definitive, so-called fingerprint compounds of beeswax, which is well preserved and almost impossible to completely filter out during processing, revealed the presence of honey. Finally, close chemical matches with other compounds, including specific phytosterols, pointed to rice as the third main ingredient. Analysis of carbon isotopes confirmed that the grain used must have come from a temperate-climate (C3) plant like rice, not a more tropical (C4) source like millet or sorghum, which have different mechanisms of photosynthesis and metabolism.

  With the help of my colleagues in the Penn Museum laboratory, Gretchen Hall and a native Chinese speaker, Chen-shan (“Ellen”) Wang, we then began the arduous task of searching the scientific literature, much of it in Chinese, to identify natural ingredients that would be consistent with our results. Other colleagues at the Museum, Atsuko Hattori and Fumi Karahashi, helped by reading Japanese texts.

  If our ancient samples had come from the Middle East, the presence of tartaric acid or tartrate would have definitively signaled a grape product such as wine, because in this region this acid or its salt is found only in grapes. In China, however, tartaric acid occurs in several other fruits—not only hawthorn but also Asiatic cornelian cherry (Cornus officialis, or shan chu yu) and longyan (Euphoria longyan, long yan)—which thus might have been ingredients.

  Smaller amounts of tartaric acid can also be derived from other plant sources native to the region, such as the leaves of Pelargonium or other flowers in the geranium family. Mold saccharification, the process by which fungi break down rice starches into sugar prior to making Chinese rice wine or Japanese sake (see below), also produces about 0.1–2.0 milligrams of tartaric acid per liter. That, however, is too dilute a concentration to explain the consistently high tartaric acid levels in the ancient samples, and we also know that this method of beverage making probably developed very late in China, perhaps only in the Han dynasty (ca. 202 B.C.–A.D. 220). Only the presence of hawthorn fruit or grape came close to explaining our experimental results.

  If we accept that these narrow, splayed-mouth jugs and jars most likely contained liquids, then it is easy to make the case that the vessels contained a mixed fermented beverage. Some wild grapes in China, including Vitis amurensis and V. quinquangularis, contain up to 19 percent simple sugar by weight, and such high-sugar fruits harbor the yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) needed to initiate fermentation. The same species of yeast also lives in honey and becomes active once the thick mass is diluted to about 30 percent sugar and 70 percent water. If the jars contained fruit juices and diluted honey, the mixture would have fermented naturally at moderately high temperatures within days. We may not be able to detect traces of ethanol now, because it is volatile and susceptible to microbial attack, but we can be assured that the end product was originally alcoholic.

  A wonderful stroke of scientific corroboration for our chemical results came after we announced that the most likely fruits in the beverage were grape or hawthorn fruit. An archaeobotanical study by Jimmy Zhao identified seeds of those very two fruits and no others at the site. I suspect that both were added to the Jiahu beverage to add flavor and encourage fermentation.

  Like grape and hawthorn fruit, the rice in the ancient beverage could have been wild or domesticated. The starches in rice had to be broken down into simple sugars before they could be digested by the yeast living in the fruit or honey. But how was the rice starch converted into sugar at this early date? One possibility is that it was sprouted and malted like barley. Diastase, an enzyme that breaks down the larger carbohydrate molecules of the grains into simple sugars, are released in this process. Another, even more likely possibility is that the rice grains were chewed, so that a related enzyme—ptyalin—in human saliva went to work on converting the starch. In remote areas of Japan and Taiwan, you can still find women sitting around a large bowl, masticating and spitting rice juice into the vessel as they prepare the rice wine for a marriage ceremony. In fact, this method of making an alcoholic beverage from a grain spans the globe, from the corn beers or chichas of the Americas to the sorghum and millet beers of Africa (see chapters 7 and 8).

  Whichever process was used, lots of yeast, rice husks, and other matter would have been left floating on the surface of the beverage. Because filtering the debris from a large vessel is cumbersome, the best way around this problem is to submerge a tube beneath the surface and suck up the liquid. Using a straw was a common way to drink a cereal beer in ancient Mesopotamia and most other parts of the ancient world. Today, it is still the way you drink your brew in isolated villages of south China (see plate 4) and among peoples living deep in the jungle of Cambodia at Angkor Wat.

  The conclusion of our extensive analyses was that the beverage makers at Jiahu were skilled enough to make a complex beverage consisting of a grape and hawthorn-fruit wine, honey mead, and rice beer. (Throughout the book, I use the term wine to refer a relatively potent alcoholic beverage—say 9 to 10 percent alcohol—and usually made from fruit, as distinct from a beer, with an alcohol level of 4 to 5 percent and whose principal component is a grain, such as rice.) You could call this mixed beverage a Chinese extreme beverage or Neolithic grog, which combines several exotic ingredients. Technically, grog describes a concoction of rum, water, sugar, and spice that became popular in the British navy beginning in the seventeenth century. The term has taken on a more general meaning, and is especially appropriate for the many mixed fermented beverages consumed in the ancient world.

  The greatest surprise from our analyses was the probable inclusion of grape as an ingredient in the Jiahu beverage, representing its earliest use for this purpose anywhere in the world. We might have expected this finding, as upward of fifty species of grape—more than half of the wild species in the world—are found in China. The historical records, however, suggest that the Chinese began to grow and exploit the fruit only much later, when General Zhang Qian traveled to Central Asia as an emissary of the emperor in the late second century B.C. and brought back the domesticated Eurasian grape (Vitis vinifera ssp. vinifera) to make wine in the capital city of Chang’an, today Xi’an. As far as we know—although further exploration may uncover new evidence—none of the many grape species found in China was ever domesticated.

  THE SPIRITS OF THE ANCESTORS

  What might at first seem to be unrelated pieces of an archaeological puzzle in the elite musician burials at Jiahu—the flutes and rattles, the fork-shaped objects, the earliest written characters on tortoise shells, the Chinese Neolithic grog—begin to fall into place when we view them as the first glimmerings of a shamanistic cult adapted to the new circumstances of the Chinese Neolithic Revolution. With a more secure economy, the office of “shaman” could have become a full-time profession. For example, music making requires well-developed motor skills, especially hand-eye coordination. By devising more and better musical instruments—the rattles, flutes with impressive tonal ranges, and drums stretched tight with alligator skin—and improving their dexterity, the ritual specialists or shamans of the community could more effectively communicate with the other world, assuring a better life for the villagers, protection from evil forces, and cures for diseases.

  Later texts, including the Book of Records (Li ji) and Book of Conduct (Yi li), which incorporate rituals and religious ideas going back to the early Western Zhou dynasty around the eighth century B.C., provide clues about what rituals might have been carried out at Jiahu. When a member of the community died, libations of wine and special foods—including steamed millet and roasted mutton—were offered as sacrifices to the clan ancestors and gods. The ceremony was highly formalized, with certain animals killed at specific times and places, and accompanied by music and dance.
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  The day of the funeral was determined by divination. Then, on the fourth day of a seven-day fast, stalks were cast as lots to select the shi (“descendant”), usually a grandson or daughter-in-law of the deceased, who would communicate with the ancestors and perform the burial rites. On this day, the spirit of the deceased was invited, in the person of the shi, to “take some refreshment,” presumably a drink of a fermented beverage. By consuming the beverage, the shi was identified with the deceased and dead ancestors in general.

  Physically weakened by fasting for seven days and mentally exhausted, the shi was urged to visualize the deceased in as much detail as possible, including his facial expressions, the things he enjoyed most in life, and his voice. At this stage in the ceremony, the shi and other participants might well have begun to experience altered states of consciousness and hallucinations.

  The coup de grâce came on the seventh day of the fast, when the deceased was buried and the sacrificial meal presented in the temple. The shi, who orchestrated the ritual, ate and drank both for himself and for the ancestor world. The shi had to drink nine cups of millet or rice wine, served hot in a ceremonial vessel of the gu or zhi type. These tall goblets, up to thirty centimeters tall, can hold as much as two hundred milliliters. If we assume that the millet or rice wine of the period contained about 10 percent alcohol (see below), the quantity of wine consumed by the shi would have amounted to downing more than two bottles of modern grape wine or putting back eight shots of 80-proof whiskey. After the period of fasting, the brain of the shi must have been swimming with visions.

  Shi ode 209 of the eighth century B.C. captures the mood of the proceedings:

  The rituals are completed;

  The bells and drums have sounded

  The pious descendant [shi] goes to his place,

  the officiating invoker makes his announcement:

  “The spirits are all drunk”;

  the august representative of the dead then rises,

  the drums and bells escort away the representative

  The divine protectors [the spirits] then return [leave the temple].

  (Karlgren 1950)

  We can imagine the Neolithic bone flutes and rattles in the tombs of the elite musicians at Jiahu serving a similar purpose to that of the bells and drums of five thousand years later. A mixed fermented beverage made of rice, grapes, hawthorn fruit, and honey would have been used rather than the millet or rice wine. The Jiahu vessels were different in shape but could have held just as much as a Zhou goblet. All the prerequisites of the later ceremony were present in embryonic form at Jiahu.

  The roles of the early shamans at Jiahu probably later became separate, specialized functions, such as professional healer, medium, and musician. The Jiahu musicians were probably much more like our concept of the Palaeolithic shamans or their modern Siberian or Amazonian counterparts. Besides being musicians, they would have been the idea men, highly facile with signs and art, technically proficient, and, most important, with a mystical bent, stimulated by a fermented beverage, that brought them into contact with the gods and ancestors.

  A later legend about the Yellow Emperor (Huang Di), who is believed to have established kingship in China some four thousand years ago, distills the essence of shamanism. The first emperor sent one of his scholars to the distant mountains of Central Asia to cut and collect bamboo for making flutes to duplicate the call of the mythical phoenix. The music of this special instrument, he believed, would bring his reign into harmony with the universe. Here again, as for the Jiahu and Palaeolithic flutes, high-flying birds and their songs provide the means of access to invisible, otherworldly realms.

  The hypothesis of a shamanistic funeral feast associated with the elite musicians at Jiahu, while extremely plausible, has not been proved by residue analyses of vessels from the tombs. All the pottery I selected for testing came from residences. None of these houses—of which fifty have been excavated to date—stood out as being especially distinctive, so it is surmised that the use of the fermented beverage was widespread throughout the community. Besides being essential to special occasions, it might have been drunk to celebrate good times with neighbors, to sip on when feeling down or sick, or to motivate and reward. Because only 5 percent of the site has been excavated, we should be prepared for future surprises.

  BRINGING THE PAST TO LIFE

  When our findings from Jiahu first appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences toward the end of 2004, we braced for a lot of press coverage. We had discovered the world’s earliest alcoholic beverage, and it came from China, not the Middle East as one might have expected. Still, we were not prepared for the extent of the media buzz, which demonstrated that the finding had struck a universal chord.

  John Noble Wilford of the New York Times was the first reporter to reach me by phone. He had used the term happy hour in a previous article about our Near Eastern research, suggesting that he had a penchant for an occasional quaff himself. His story was picked up by the International Herald Tribune and went around the world, as did several BBC interviews. The wine writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Deborah Scoblionkov, was also immediately on the story, and soon a photographer came calling. He captured me on camera doing some nineteenth-century archaeological chemistry—sniffing at the ingredients of one ancient sample—but I did not go so far as to taste it, as one chemist did a century ago. Deborah’s story became a Reuters wire story, and soon I had reporters from major European publications—Focus, Geo, and many others—wanting their own exclusives. In China, the main government news agency, Xinhua, gave the story prime coverage, and one of my coauthors on the paper, Guangsheng Cheng, wrote to say that “you are now a celebrity of the CCP—the Chinese Communist Party.” I had finally arrived!

  It was one thing to analyze a 9,000-year-old beverage; but then we started thinking, why not bring it back to life to allow others to enjoy it and feel themselves transported back in time? We had already had some success in re-creating another, more recent ancient beverage, based on residues found in the tomb of King Midas or one of his royal forebears (see chapter 5). I spoke with Sam Calagione, the owner and brewer of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Milton, Delaware, who had been the inspiration behind the modern formulation of the beverage we called Midas Touch, and he was game. With his experimental brewer, Mike Gerhart, he conjured up a Neolithic brew.

  There were many challenges and lots of false starts in re-creating a Chinese Neolithic beverage, the story of which is amusingly retold by Larry Gallagher in his article “Stone Age Beer,” in the November 2005 issue of Discover magazine. Should we use only grape, only hawthorn fruit, or both? Because seeds of both fruits had been recovered at Jiahu, I said we should use both. Mike eventually tracked down a Chinese herbalist on the West Coast who could provide us with genuine hawthorn fruit, but we could not procure any genuine Chinese grapes and had to settle for a V. v. vinifera cultivar of ancient stock, Muscat. The honey presented a similar problem. One wildflower honey from Central Asia is especially prized, but we had to settle for a more accessible American equivalent.

  Chinese rice is readily available in the States. My question to Mike was whether we should use milled rice or brown rice, with the surface bran intact and perhaps even unhulled. The residents of Jiahu had stone mills for processing rice, but it was unlikely that their procedure was very refined. We decided to use a pregelatinized rice, which had already been cooked to a thick, homogeneous paste and dried, with some of the original bran and hulls mixed in.

  The next question was how to saccharify the rice. When I told Sam that the earliest way of doing this was likely by chewing, he said, “Okay, let’s do it that way to keep it historically accurate.” I said that sometimes you could take experimental archaeology too far, and in any case, sprouting rice to make malt might have been discovered at an early date. When Larry Gallagher offered to make his own version of the experimental beverage by chewing rice with his fiancée, we were off the hook. Larry’s experimen
t apparently did not turn out well, as he never sent me a bottle to taste.

  At an early stage in the Dogfish Head experiments, Mike tried saccharifying the rice with a traditional Chinese mold concoction (qu). My contact in Beijing, Guangsheng Cheng, passed on some of the starting agent, with detailed instructions on its use, through a graduate student, Kai Wang, at Michigan State University. It produced a kind of sour mash. Because it would constitute only a small part of the finished product, we were not worried.

  Another critical issue was whether to carry out a natural fermentation, depending entirely on the wild yeast present on the grape skins and in the honey, or to help the process along by adding some cultured yeast. We opted for the latter, but were then left with the problem of what kind of yeast to use. I suggested several strains, but Mike wasn’t convinced that they were native to China or had been around for nine thousand years. We compromised and used a dry sake yeast, as the Japanese version of rice wine is a direct descendant of the Chinese beverage.

  Our debut re-creation of the beverage was produced using the small-scale setup that had started Sam on his brewing career, some old vats tucked away in a corner of his brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. With Larry Gallagher scrutinizing our every move, we started brewing at around nine in the morning. Into the pot went the rice malt, up went the temperatures, and out came the wort (the sweet liquid extracted from the malt). I was most concerned when the powdered hawthorn fruit was dumped into the kettle. I thought there was too much of this rather mouth-puckering, chalky fruit; but Mike had already decided on the proportions, and we kept to those.