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Deep Cuts Episode 2: Beer! It's Liquid Bread!

After last week's delicious look at bread-like substances from the ancient past, Amber and Anna take you on a pub crawl through human history. This month's Deep Cut explores the earliest fermented beverages found in the archaeological record, contemporary attempts (and successes!) in recreating ancient beer recipes, and we ask the possibly unnecessary question of Did Man Once Live On Beer Alone?  Cheers!

To learn more about this week's topic, check out: 

Braidwood, Robert J., et al. "Symposium: did man once live by beer alone?." American Anthropologist 55.4 (1953): 515-526.

Damerow, Peter. "Sumerian beer: the origins of brewing technology in ancient Mesopotamia." Cuneiform Digital Library Journal 2 (2012): 1-20.


Frank, Alex. "Drinking Through a Straw Could Get You Drunk Faster." Spoon University. 


Holloway, April. "Sip Like a Sumerian: Ancient Beer Recipe Recreated from Millennia-Old Cuneiform Tablets." Ancient Origins.


Fermented beverages of pre- and proto-historic China

Patrick E. McGovern, Juzhong Zhang, Jigen Tang, Zhiqing Zhang, Gretchen R. Hall, Robert A. Moreau, Alberto Nuñez, Eric D. Butrym, Michael P. Richards, Chen-shan Wang, Guangsheng Cheng, Zhijun Zhao, Changsui Wang

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Dec 21; 101(51): 17593–17598. Published online 2004 Dec 8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0407921102


McGovern, Patrick. "Barley Beer: Brewing Up A Civilization in the Near East" https://www.penn.museum/sites/biomoleculararchaeology/?page_id=84 


Tucker, Abigail. "The Beer Archaeologist." Smithsonian.com


Excavations and research at Tel Bazi at LMU-Munich (in German and English)


And even more!

Egyptian alchemist's recipe brings ancient beer to life in Winnipeg 

These people recreated an ancient Roman beer, and here’s what they learned 

Stanford students recreate 5,000-year-old Chinese beer recipe 

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.