Did Early Indians Make Beer?

Who were the first people to make beer? Many archeologists have been under the presumption that Europeans introduced this delight to the tribes of the American Southwest. Archeologists studying areas of New Mexico believe that Indians and native peoples had been fermenting beverages, and making beer, long before Europeans arrived on the scene.

Glenna Dean, the archeologist for the state of New Mexico, working in conjunction with Sandia National Laboratories has found evidence that indicates that native inhabitants had been fermenting foods long before other cultures arrived in America. They detailed their findings in a recent press release.

Even today, there is a tribe of native people that drink a beer they call tiswin. Living in northern Mexico, the Tarahumara Indians ferment corn kernels to make this drink. The end product? It is a very weak beer.

Researchers wondered if the former residents of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, ancestral puebloan farmers, made beer, and used the same type of fermentation process. They tested this theory.

They used pot shards from actual 800-year-old settlements that were originally found in west-central New Mexico, along with other pots that were used by both Tarahumara Indians and other populations who have lived in the area.

Researchers did what people have been doing for centuries. They fermented corn kernels, and made the weak beer, tiswin. Using specialized equipment, researchers discovered the same chemical and vapors in the pots that were used to make tiswin as what was found in the Tarahumara Indian nation.

Taking this a step further, researchers compared their results with those of pots and pot shards that had been used by Indians but had been buried for centuries, and had never been exposed to these materials before. The result? The same substances were discovered in these pots as well.

There is a lot of historical evidence that supports the concept that people worldwide had been consuming fermented beverages for centuries. Many people were forced to drink fermented beverages, like beer, because they did not have purified water.

Indeed, fermentation was the process utilized to purify water.

Researchers said that Egyptian tombs often had loaves of bread stored in them. These were not there to eat, but they were there to help ferment water. Add yeast (bread) to water and you can make a fermented beverage, like beer.

"There's been an artificial construct among archeologists working in New Mexico that no one had alcohol here until the Spanish brought grapes and wine. That's so counter-intuitive. It doesn't make sense to me as a social scientist that New Mexico would have been an island in pre-Columbian times. By this reasoning, ancestral puebloans would have been the only ones in the Southwest not to know about fermentation," said Dean.

Source:
http://www.newswise.com/p/articles/view/535910/