speaking of peru

This chicha libation vessel was cast into a brewery as it was being abandoned and burned. The vessel was broken and scorched in the fire, but it was pieced back together by researchers.




In ancient Peru, women made the beer

Archaeologists reconstruct last days of a pre-Inca brewery
By Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience managing editor
LiveScience
Updated: 6:04 p.m. ET Nov. 14, 2005
An ancient brewery from a vanished empire was staffed by elite women who were selected for their beauty or nobility, a new study concludes.
The finding adds to other evidence that women played a more crucial role in ancient Andean societies than history books have stated. It may also in some ways reflect modern drinking traditions in the Andean mountains, where women get drunk as much as men, researchers say.
The brewery, on a mountaintop in southern Peru, cranked out hundreds of gallons of beer every week. The 1,000-year-old facility was part of the Wari empire, which predated the Incas.
Archaeologists have pieced together the last days before the city was evacuated for unknown reasons. A final batch of chicha, as the drink is called, was prepared. A week later, nobility drank the chicha as part of a big feast and ceremony. More than two dozen precious ceramic vessels — the chicha mugs — were tossed into embers of a fire and smashed as sacrifices to the gods.
Then the residents mysteriously fled.
"Our analyses indicate that this specialty brew was a high-class affair," said Patrick Ryan Williams, curator of anthropology at the Field Museum and co-author of the research report. "Corn and Peruvian pepper-tree berries were used to make the beer, which was drunk from elaborate beakers up to half a gallon in volume."
Water had to be brought up from 1,000 feet (300 meters) below the city's 8,000-foot (2.4-kilometer-high) mountaintop perch. ...................