To get started on a bust

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3,000 Year Old piece of pottery in Papua New Guinea

"A piece of red, glossy pottery found in the rugged highlands of Papua New Guinea has been shown to be the oldest-known pottery in New Guinea. Tim Denham of Australian National University, working with researchers from Otago University, obtained precise dates for the pottery as part of a study to learn more about how the technology spread throughout the Pacific. People who lived on the coast of Papua New Guinea would have had contact with seafaring, pottery-making cultures such as the Lapita people. “It’s an example of how technology spread among cultures. Some pottery must have soon found its way into the highlands, which inspired the highlanders to try making it themselves,” Denham said in a press release. “And it shows human history is not always a smooth progression—later on pottery making was abandoned across most of the highlands of New Guinea. No one knows when or why,” he said. To read about smoked mummies in Papua New Guinea, go to the current issue's "World Roundup."

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Recreating Booze from Ancient Pottery

"Resurrecting ancient beers and wines is a subtle alchemy, but Patrick McGovern knows all the tricks. He directs the Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Many of his ancient brews are sold by Dogfish Head brewery in Delaware.
 

How did you start making ancient drinks?
One of the first we made was the Midas beverage, based on residues in bronze vessels recovered from the Midas tomb in Turkey, which dates from 700 B.C. These pointed to an unusual drink combining wine, barley beer, and mead. There were also food remains in the tomb that suggested a barbecued lamb or goat stew with lentils and spices. We tried to recreate the funerary feast as a way of bringing the past to life.

How do you go about recreating a drink?
People give me either samples of pottery or residues from ancient vessels possibly used for making, storing, or drinking a fermented beverage. I identify the markers of specific natural products: Tartaric acid is a fingerprint compound for grapes in the Middle East, for example, while calcium oxalate points to the presence of barley beer.

What did the Midas beverage taste like?
We knew the three basic components—grapes, barley, and honey—but we didn’t know what the bittering agent was. It couldn’t be hops, as they only became available in Europe around 700, so we looked at the eastern Mediterranean spices that would have been available: saffron, cardamom, bitter vetch, cumin. In a competition among microbreweries to recreate the beverage, Delaware-based Dogfish Head used the best-quality saffron as their bittering agent, as well as Greek honey made from thyme blossom. Their winning beverage was on the sweet side, but the saffron gave it aromatic properties."

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