You Are What You Drink

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290167034 You Are What You Drink Chapter · March 2009 DOI: 10.5744/florida/9780813033068.003.0006 CITATION READS 1 32 3 authors, including: David J. Goldstein Patrick Ryan Williams National Park Service Field Museum of Natural History 14 PUBLICATIONS 48 CITATIONS 53 PUBLICATIONS 720 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Social Justice and Historic Preservation in American Cities View project All content following this page was uploaded by David J. Goldstein on 16 June 2016. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. All in-text references underlined in blue are added to the original document and are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you access and read them immediately. Chapter 7 You are What You Drink: A Socio-Cultural Reconstruction of Prehispanic Fermented Beverage Use at Cerro Baúl, Moquegua, Perú David J. Goldstein, Robin C. Coleman, and Patrick R. Williams “When you talk about chicha it is important to specify the kind as the word chicha was used by the Spaniards to describe both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, many of which are made from a vast variety of plants prepared in distinct ways.” - Cutler and Cardenas (1947:33) The ethnobotanical and ethnohistoric record of the Andes is replete with examples of fermented beverages made from a large number of grains and fruits and, as Cutler and Cardenas observed, the Spaniards recognized that there were many different kinds of chichas. Andean anthropology and archaeology research, however, often focus largely on beer made from Zea mays (maize). There is no doubt that maize beer was central to Inca culture and remains important today throughout portions of this region. This emphasis on maize beer nonetheless neglects beverages made from other grains, e.g., Chenopodium quinoa (quinoa), Amaranthus caudatus (kiwicha), and fruits that have also been essential to Andean society. 1 The production and consumption patterns of fermented beverages varied in space and time across a landscape that was far more multilingustic, multiethnic, and multicultural before the Columbian encounter. Since fermented beverages often play a significant role in daily consumption, small-scale ritual, and scheduled religious and agricultural festivals, we can look at differences in the use and production of these drinks as potentially distinct ethnic markers in the Andean past. The choice of a particular beverage was dependent in part on regional resource availability and gustatory preference, and these choices helped to shape the historical trajectories of the cultures that selected them. We suggest that archaeologists have yet to offer a sufficiently nuanced interpretation of fermented beverages at an archaeological site. Spatial and temporal components of alcohol consumption and production, coupled with ethnohistoric and ethnographic evidence, can be used as keys to understanding cultural preference and, potentially, to deciphering issues of identity and ethnicity in the archaeological record. In this case study, we look at the use of fermented beverages in the Middle Horizon (500-1000 AD) Wari Imperial state at Cerro Baúl, Peru (Figure 7.1). Over the past nine years of excavation in the Upper Moquegua River drainage, research has focused on the Middle 2 Horizon settlements on Cerro Mejia and Cerro Baúl, as well as surrounding areas. The most recent seasons have recovered elite Wari contexts at Cerro Baúl with evidence of a variety of scales and kinds of fermented beverage production. Instead of fermented beverages made from corn, evidence indicates that the fruits from the Schinus molle L. (Anacardiaceae) tree were used to brew most of the beer consumed at the site. In this chapter, we trace the production and consumption of beverages made by molle and other fruits and grains through Middle Horizon excavation contexts in the Upper Moquegua Valley. Our approach enhances our ability to understand the complexities of the roles that fermented beverages played in this Middle Horizon society and to see their use as more than aides for interpreting reciprocal labor arrangements and political power. We begin our discussion by looking at the diversity of Andean fermented beverages in the Colonial Period and the present. After examining the relationship between food preferences and identity, we look at the centrality of fermented beverages produced from sources other than corn at Cerro Baúl. We explore the potential for the use of other kinds of grains for fermented beverage production, corn and quinoa, within different settings at the site, and then examine the use of molle drinks. In the end we interpret the significance of the molle data with regards to how fermented beverage production is interpreted at other Prehispanic 3 sites in the Andes. Chicha: Defining Terms Although anthropologists and archaeologists often use the term chicha, its genesis is rarely explored. As others have noted, the word chicha originates either in the Caribbean region from chibcha (Arawakan language family), a general word for fermented beverages (Cardenas and Cutler 1947), or is derived from the contact period languages spoken by the Cuna (now modern Panama) (Pardo B. 2004). Regardless of its origin, the Spanish adopted the word chicha when they arrived in the Americas to describe a great variety of indigenous beverages, fermented and non-fermented. Used instead of other distinguishing terms common to European parlance at the time, e.g., wine (fermented and aged fruit beverages) and beer (grain based fermented beverages), chicha served to conflate all of the beverages into a single term. Indigenous peoples today, as well as at the time of contact, did not distinguish between beers made from grains and fruits, instead chicha glosses all indigenous fermented beverages, wine appears only in contexts where ethnically European fermented beverages made from grapes are discussed. Since the primary beverage in the Inca Empire was maize beer, the term chicha became most commonly associated with this type of beverage in European discussions of indigenous fermented beverages. Five-hundred years later, 4 archaeologists and anthropologists continue to use this term to refer to maize beer, as do many of the Spanish-speaking peoples in the region ---despite the many varieties of fermented beverages used in the Prehispanic Period up to the present day. Sidney Mintz argues that food use ‘implicates meaning’ (1985:6), and that the terms used within cuisines of distinct ethnic and cultural traditions are critical to the understanding of how food is used and symbolically interpreted by a given group. Even so, anthropologists have often conflated these meaningful terms, most commonly “chicha de maíz” (corn beer) (Guillet 1979; Hastorf and Johannessen 1993; Mayer 2002; Mitchell 1991; Weismantel 1998). Maize drinks have a variety of linguistically distinct names that originate in the region’s myriad languages. Table 7.1 demonstrates the diversity of indigenous modern concepts of fermented beverages made from corn, based on the kinds of fermentation and types of corn used in the production of each. The list in Table 7.1 is not exhaustive1, but is representative in illustrating the diversity of terms used in different contexts of corn beer consumption in the region today. Overall, the Andean watershed is home to some 100 or more languages, within each one of these languages one finds words, methods, and contexts of use for fermented beverages made from fruits or grains (Table 7.2). Each particular fruit or grain requires different methods and technologies for the successful 5 conversion of plant starches, to sugars, and eventually into alcohol. The table illustrates that there are both significant gaps in our knowledge of names of the beverages used (Table 7.2: Column 1) and in our understanding of preparation techniques and local uses. Despite the inconsistent data gathered by regional ethnographers, it is clear that indigenous terminology beverage differences extend from basic ingredients to production steps, fermentation time, social contexts of consumption, and other factors. Whereas a body of research about alcoholic beverage production exists for Central America (Bruman 2000) from the colonial period to the present, this type of study is still lacking for the Andes. The umbrella term chicha, in the historico- colonial sense, is a legacy of the conquest of the Americas. The term (see Table 7.1), as researched by Cardenas (1989), is particular to ritual indigenous religious offerings to non- indigenous language speakers or relations who are seen as Spaniards. What we know in Peruvian Spanish as chicha de maíz, however, is known in Quechua and Aymara, the most extensive modern Andean languages, as akka and kusa, respectively (see Table 7.1). In these instances, these words have their root meanings as ‘fermented’ or ‘fermented beverage’ (Cardenas 1989). The term chicha as presently used homogenizes the variety of indigenous fermented beverage production and consumption contexts that make 6 each beverage and tradition distinct. In continuing this usage in archaeology we unwittingly erase the social and cultural complexities that fermented beverages play in society today, and create our own problematic within our archaeological reconstructions. Chicha as an Ethnic Marker Mary Douglas notes that “drinking is essentially a social

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