Ancient Brewery Tended by Elite, Female Brewmasters

[emad]

Ancient Brewery Tended by Elite, Female Brewmasters

By: University of Florida

If the ancient mountaintop city in southern Peru was the vanished Wari empire's unique imperial showplace, the brewery was its piece de resistance.

Outfitted with fire pits and large stones that supported huge ceramic vats, it had the capacity to churn out weekly batches of hundreds of gallons of brew – a highly impractical alcoholic delicacy, given the city's perch thousands of feet above the nearest water source.

Archaeologists from the University of Florida and The Field Museum in Chicago last year announced that the 1,000-year-old industrial scale brewery, built by the largest empire to predate the Inca, appeared to be the oldest in the Andes mountains. In a paper to appear next week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they make public another noteworthy discovery: At least 10 elegant metal shawl pins on the brewery floor.

The finding suggests the brewers who made the brew -- based on a pepper tree berry and known today as chicha -- were wealthy women of the highest social class.

"The brewers were not only women, but elite women," said Donna Nash, an adjunct curator at The Field Museum and one of a team of archaeologists who have spent years excavating the remnants of the city atop a mesa known today as Cerro Baúl. "They weren't slaves, and they weren't people of low status. So the fact that they made the beer probably made it even more special."
http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_27834.shtml

[sui generis]

1. or it could have

actually been the world's oldest lesbian bar. They missed the gay bar next mountain over.



:silly:

[shenmue]

2. Wonderful

What a story. Warms the heart.

Think I'll move there and worship them...

:thumbsup:

:7

[ewagner]

3. Tears in my eyses

what more could a man ask for?????

Elite woman
dedicating their lives to brewing beer....

I'm getting all choked up again.

[trotsky]

4. If there's a heaven,

it had better have that. :toast:

[ewagner]

6. That

and a Fleet-Farm store....:rofl:

[trotsky]

7. I bought my latest sump pump there!

Of COURSE we'll need a Fleet-Farm! LOL

[Shipwack]

9. Pastafarian heaven has a beer volcano...

All praise his noodly goodness!

Can I get a "Ramen" from the house?

[northernsoul]

10. Ramen, Shipwack, Ramen!

hey, I think I feel a noodly appendage right now!

[sasquatch]

5. Mmm...Ancient Peruvian beer

:beer:

[EVDebs]

8. St. Pauli Girlz ! nt