"Lacing the beer served at their feasts with hallucinogens may have helped an ancient Peruvian people known as the Wari forge political alliances and expand their empire, according to a new paper published in the journal Antiquity. Recent excavations at a remote Wari outpost called Quilcapampa unearthed seeds from the vilca tree that can be used to produce a potent hallucinogenic drug. The authors think the Wari held one big final blowout before the site was abandoned." Source: Ars Technica.
An old dig in progress at Quilcapampa. Video from 2015.
The Wari, and presumably other cultures of the time, used the Anadenantherea colubrina tree, aka the vilca tree, for a variety of purposes, and its beans contained a powerful entheogen:
"The beans of A. colubrina are used to make a snuff called vilca (sometimes called cebil). The bean pods are roasted to facilitate removal of the husk, followed by grinding with a mortar and pestle into a powder and mixed with a natural form of calcium hydroxide (lime) or calcium oxide. The main active constituent of vilca is bufotenin; to a much lesser degree DMT and 5-MeO-DMT are also present." (Wikipedia)
Video from 2018. The theory that Maya civilization collapsed due to drought-related causes is widespread, but if this new research is correct the collapse may not have occurred for that reason after all.
"A new study casts doubt on drought as the driver of ancient Mayan civilization collapse. There is no dispute that a series of droughts occurred in the Yucatan Peninsula of southeastern Mexico and northern Central America at the end of the ninth century, when Maya cities mysteriously began to be depopulated. Believing the Maya were mostly dependent on drought-sensitive corn, beans, and squash, some scholars assume the droughts resulted in starvation." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"However, a new analysis by UC Riverside archaeologist Scott Fedick and plant physiologist Louis Santiago shows the Maya had nearly 500 edible plants available to them, many of which are highly drought resistant. The results of this analysis have now been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"'Even in the most extreme drought situation — and we have no clear evidence the most extreme situation ever occurred — 59 species of edible plants would still have persisted,' Santiago said."
"The Festival of Drunkenness is a religiously significant celebration that was held annually (said to be biannually in some places) by the ancient Egyptians. The background story for the celebration of this festival can be found in a text known as The Book of the Heavenly Cow [next video]. In this text, there is an ancient Egyptian myth involving the destruction of mankind. According to the myth, human beings were saved from extinction thanks, in part, to alcohol." Source: Ancient Origins (2016).
From what I've read, the Festival of Drunkenness wasn't just a big celebration with some harmless social drinking; it was about getting completely plastered and passing out to commemorate how booze saved humanity from the bloodthirsty warrior goddess, Sekhmet:
"According to the story, Ra had become weary of people's endless cruelty and nonsense and so sent Sekhmet to destroy them. She took to her task with enthusiasm, tearing people apart and drinking their blood. Ra is satisfied with the destruction until the other gods point out to him that, if he wanted to teach people a lesson, he should stop the destruction before no one was left to learn from it. Ra then orders the goddess of beer, Tenenet, to dye a large quantity of the brew red and has it delivered to Dendera, right in Sekhmet's path of destruction. She finds it and, thinking it is blood, drinks it all, falls asleep, and wakes up as the gentle and beneficent Hathor." (Ancient History Encyclopedia)
In other words, all it took to transform the homicidal blood-slurping Sekhmet (often represented as a lion) into Hathor, the goddess of "music, dance, joy, love, sexuality and maternal care" (often represented as a cow) was to get Sekhmet drunk. I also like the bit about how Ra had to be reminded that there was no point in killing everybody if his goal was to teach people a lesson. This is a great story, much more human than the legend of Yahweh exterminating his own creations (humans as well as animals) in a flood.
Note: According to the Ancient Architects video at the top of this post, the Festival of Drunkenness "could potentially explain the original pre-dynastic origins of the Great Sphinx - as a bloodthirsty statue of an Egyptian lion goddess."
Ancient Egypt is normally seen as kind of austere and grim, but the Egyptians had all sorts of feasts and banquets and they liked their beer:
"Considering the value the ancient Egyptians placed on enjoying life, it is no surprise that they are known as the first civilization to perfect the art of brewing beer. The Egyptians were so well known as brewers, in fact, that their fame eclipsed the actual inventors of the process, the Sumerians, even in ancient times." Source: Ancient History Encylopedia.
The Festival of Drunkenness goes way back:
"Originally, it was thought these rituals took place later in Egyptian history when they were ruled by the Greeks and Romans. However, recent discoveries from the excavations of the Temple of Mut complex in Luxor show they took place much earlier - around 1470 BCE. ... the Festival of Drunkenness was celebrated by people at least once a year, sometimes twice, in homes, temples and makeshift desert shrines. It was different than many other temple ceremonies as the priests or pharaoh would act on behalf of the people. In this ritual, everyone participated together -- the elites and the peasants. The scene is described in a hymn to Sakhnet as young women with flowing garlands in their hair serving alcohol to everyone They all drink to the point of passing out, then are awoken to the beating of drums and the priests carried out a likeness of the goddess Hathor and they present their petitions to her. It wasn’t just drinking going on either. Graffiti was found discussing 'traveling the marshes', which is a euphemism for having sex. These festivals took place at the beginning of the Nile floods in mid-August, which hearkened to the fertility and renewal of the land by the floods." Source: Naked History (2017).
How can you not like a civilization where everyone took part in a festival like this at least once a year? Drunken orgies have been popular throughout history, of course, but they've gradually lost their religious context. Next video describes William Hogarth's moralistic series of paintings, A Rake's Progress (1733-35). I like to think that the Festival of Drunkenness in ancient Egypt involved scenes like these all over the country.
"The last meal of Tollund Man, a bog body from Early Iron Age Denmark, has been re-examined using new analyses of plant macrofossils, pollen, non-pollen palynomorphs, steroid markers and proteins found in his gut. Some 12–24 hours before he was killed, he ate a porridge containing barley, pale persicaria and flax, and probably some fish. Proteins and eggs from intestinal worms indicate that he was infected with parasites. Although the meal may reflect ordinary Iron Age fare, the inclusion of threshing waste could possibly relate to ritual practices. This re-analysis illustrates that new techniques can throw fresh light on old questions and contribute to understanding life and death in the Danish Early Iron Age." Source: Cambridge University Press.
"Henry's food was prepared, in a private kitchen, under the direction of the Privy Master Cook, John Bricket." Source: Historic Royal Palaces.
"The King ate in his private rooms, away from the crowds but on more formal occasions he sat alone at a high covered table in his Presence Chamber, under the canopy of state. He chose from a huge buffet, sampling whatever took his fancy. Dishes included game, roasted or served in pies, lamb, venison and swan.
"For banquets, more unusual items, such as conger eel [see below] and porpoise could be on the menu. Sweet dishes were often served along with savoury.
"Only the King was given a fork, with which he ate sweet preserves. Forks were used to serve, cook and carve, but eating with them didn’t become popular until the 17th century."
Comment: I love the term "presence chamber." Technically the outer room of the privy chamber, a private "apartment" the king maintained at his various royal residences, the presence chamber was the place where ordinary mortals were granted the privilege of entering into the awesome presence of the king himself. At times, they had the extra honor of viewing the majestic king stuffing his face with the endless stream of food that came out of the royal kitchens.
In his youth, Henry VIII was an athlete, but as he grew older he turned into a seriously grotesque chubster who was apparently so fat he couldn't even walk around on his own:
"Late in life, Henry became obese, with a waist measurement of 54 inches (140 cm), and had to be moved about with the help of mechanical inventions. He was covered with painful, pus-filled boils and possibly suffered from gout." (Wikipedia)
Henry ate a lot, true, but that isn't the primary reason he got so fat. Everyone at court ate like he did back then (more or less). Furthermore, everyone in Tudor England was drunk all the time (see 0:29 in the top video). Henry probably started to turn into a blimp when leg injuries forced him to become more sedentary:
"Even by modern standards, and certainly by those of the ordinary man or woman in 16th-century England, Henry ate a good deal. That was what his social group, the high nobility, did. When the noble entertained, food was often served in large quantities as part of the display of generosity or 'magnificence' incumbent upon them, and as proof of their high social status." Source: Zocalo Public Square.
"...His diet was highly calorific, but until his late 30s, Henry’s relentlessly active lifestyle burned most of them off almost as fast he absorbed them. In his early 20s, the king had a 32-inch waist and 40-inch chest. His athletic build at 29 can be judged fairly accurately from a made-to-measure suit of armour he wore at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the meeting held in June 1520 with his great rival Francis I of France.
Note: Henry wasn't a fat-ass at this time.
Henry suffered various injuries over the years from jousting and hunting accidents. He also developed leg ulcers which seriously hampered his mobility but had no effect on his ability to cram food into his increasingly bloated pie-hole:
"Henry was clearly often disabled, unable to move without intense pain. Exercising in the way he had done as a young man proved impossible, although he continued to ride and to hunt for some years. His appetite was, nevertheless, undiminished. He quickly gained weight, which could then not be worked off. An unhealthy cycle was set in place."
If I could eat like Henry VIII I'm not sure I could resist it, either. Just looking at the food in the top video makes me hungry, but then again I get hungry watching instructional videos about how to slaughter and butcher hogs. Venison, lamb, sweet preserves, game pies -- it sounds delicious and I don't think I would feel particularly guilty about chowing down on a porpoise or a swan. Eels sound nasty, though, or they did until I watched the next video.
This looked great until he pureed it into a disgusting mess.
Despite his prodigious intake, Henry VIII may have been malnourished. This seems hard to believe considering the amount of food the court put away:
"Tudor cuisine was lavish. An ambassador to Henry VIII’s court is quoted as saying, '…the wealth and civilization of the world are here; and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render themselves such.'" Source: Picture Britain.
The Tudors consumed a huge number of game animals, most of which I can't even identify:
"First of all, there was a lot of meat going on during this era. Just listen to this account of game found in one household’s larder: 'cranys, redshankes, fesauntes, sholardes, pacokes, knottes, bustardes, great byreds, hearonsewys, bytterns, reys, kyrlewes, wegions, dotrells, ternes, smale byrdes.' Henry’s daughter Elizabeth clearly had a taste for meat; her court went through 1,240 oxen, 8,200 sheep, 760 calves, and 1,870 pigs in a single year. In addition to vast amounts of meat, there were also delicious confections such as trifles, fools, whitepot (a baked dish of cream, eggs, and currants), clotted cream, and leach. Needless to say, this kind of cooking was hardly conducive to trim waistlines."
Most of the game animals with weird medieval names are birds, I think. The byttern or bittern looks especially plump and tasty.
The problem with a diet like this is that it consisted mostly of meat, breads and lots of alcohol (water was apparently considered to be unhealthy and the nobility avoided vegetables because they were thought to be "peasant food."). The lack of vitamin C and other nutrients in the royal diet could cause diseases like scurvy. The early symptoms of scurvy, in particular, include "weakness, feeling tired and sore arms and legs" (Wikipedia) which would have aggravated the effects of Henry's injuries and made it even harder for him to burn more calories than he consumed. And the result of that can be dramatic.
Henry sounds like a medieval version of professional eater Joey Chestnut, though Joey is in much better shape.
People have been collecting honey from bees since the Stone Age. According to Wikipedia, "[c]ollecting honey from wild bee colonies is one of the most ancient human activities and is still practiced by aboriginal societies in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In Africa, honeyguide birds have evolved a mutualist relationship with humans, leading them to hives and participating in the feast. This suggests honey harvesting by humans may be of great antiquity. Some of the earliest evidence of gathering honey from wild colonies is from rock paintings, dating to around Upper Paleolithic (13,000 BCE). Gathering honey from wild bee colonies is usually done by subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the tree or rocks where the colony is located, often resulting in the physical destruction of the nest."
"Skeps, baskets placed open-end-down, have been used to house bees for some 2000 years." (Wikipedia)
Honey was an important commodity in the ancient world. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "bee-keeping had the same importance for antiquity that sugar production has now. Honey-gathering preceded the culture of bees which began perhaps in the mesolithic period. The evidence for bee-keeping in classical antiquity is mainly literary, ranging in time from Hesiod onwards and in content from incidental allusions to codifications of the practical experience of Greek, Roman, and Carthaginian bee-masters."
Then, as now, honey was used both as a food and a medicine. Note: Honey is currently used as an antibiotic and a treatment for coughs, wounds and burns. (Wikipedia) The Egyptians and other people in the Middle East also used honey to embalm the dead in some cases.
Bees, along with other insects, were also used for divination, a form of augury known as entomomancy. Pliny the Elder describes the practice in a section on bees and beekeeping in Book XI of his monumental Natural History:
"Bees provide signs of future events both private and public, when a cluster of them hangs down in houses and temples -- portents that have often been presaged by momentous events. They settled on the mouth of Plato when he was a young child and foretold the charm of his very pleasing eloquence. They settled in Drusus' camp at the time of our great victory at Arbalo; indeed augurs, who always think the presence of bees is a bad omen, are not invariably correct." -- from Book XI, Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, Penguin Classics.
Note: "The oldest known honey remains were found in the country of Georgia. Archaeologists found honey remains on the inner surface of clay vessels unearthed in an ancient tomb, dating back some 4,700–5,500 years. In ancient Georgia, several types of honey were buried with a person for their journey into the afterlife, including linden, berry, and meadow-flower varieties." (Wikipedia)
Report from 2012.
Related:How to Construct a Claypot Hive. "Clay tiles were the customary homes of kept bees in the eastern end of the Mediterranean," according to Wikipedia. "Long cylinders of baked clay were used in ancient Egypt, the Middle East and to some extent in Greece, Italy and Malta. They sometimes were used singly, but more often stacked in rows to provide some shade, at least for those not on top. Keepers would smoke one end to drive the bees to the other end while they harvested honey."
Bees and their secretions have many unusual properties, some of which were described by the great Roald Dahl in his story Royal Jelly.
Hunting, foraging and scavenging for food must have been incredibly risky for prehistoric people. Plants can be toxic -- certain types of mushrooms, for instance -- and animals can get infected with all sorts of diseases and parasites. Scavenging the rotting, flyblown carcasses of dead animals sounds particularly dangerous, especially if you eat them raw. Even if you don't catch a fatal disease, just getting sick could slow you down enough to make you vulnerable to exposure and predators. Hunting itself was a dangerous activity and there were other risks involved with eating meat, fish, seeds and so on:
"You'll be healthier if you ate as your ancestors did. At least that's the promise of some modern fads such as the 'caveman' or paleo diet—characterized by avoiding processed food and grains and only eating things like meat, fish, and seeds. But a new study suggests the food some early humans in Norway ate may have not only been unhealthy, but downright toxic. In some cases, these people may have consumed more than 20 times the levels of dangerous metals recommended for humans today." Source: Science Magazine (2020).
It's unclear when people first started to cook meat and plants and even more unclear how the discovery was made, but cooking would have reduced the risks of bacterial and parasitic infection to a certain extent. In any case, the prehistoric diet sounds fantastically dangerous, especially before the invention of fire, and early humans also had to worry about becoming food themselves.
"Researchers have uncovered evidence of the storage and delayed consumption of animal bone marrow at Qesem Cave near Tel Aviv. The research provides direct evidence that early Paleolithic people saved animal bones for up to nine weeks before feasting on them inside the cave." Source: Science Daily (2019).
It's been known for a long time that prehistoric people ate bone marrow, but this particular find apparently provides the first evidence that they sometimes saved their bones for later, stockpiling them like canned food. That makes sense, but it's hard to tell how accurate this kind of research is because it involves the interpretation of chop marks on very ancient bones:
According to one of the researchers, "'The most common prey was fallow deer, and limbs and skulls were brought to the cave while the rest of the carcass was stripped of meat and fat at the hunting scene and left there. We found that the deer leg bones, specifically the metapodials, exhibited unique chopping marks on the shafts, which are not characteristic of the marks left from stripping fresh skin to fracture the bone and extract the marrow.'"
Bone marrow must've been a major part of the prehistoric diet:
"Many cultures have used bone marrow as food throughout history. Some anthropologists believe that early humans were scavengers rather than hunters in some regions of the world. Marrow would have been a useful food source (largely due to its fat content) for tool-using hominids, who were able to crack open the bones of carcasses left by apex predators such as lions." (Wikipedia)
The evidence is clear that prehistoric humans hunted mammoths in what is now Siberia. This 2016 video, for instance, describes one find that dated back to almost 45,000 years ago. Butchering these huge animals must have been a difficult and time-consuming job for hunters using stone tools.
"Experts have confirmed that ancient hunters resided on Kotelny, off the coast of Yakutia, at 75°20'N 141°00'E, a remarkable 990 kilometres (615 miles) north of the Arctic Circle. Their butchering tools have been found alongside multiple bones of extinct woolly mammoths." Source: Archaeology news Network (2021).
Note: This is a very harsh and remote region, to say the least, but it must have been teeming with wildlife back in the Stone Age:
"Ymyakhtakh culture (c. 2200–1300 BC) was a Late Neolithic culture of Siberia, with a very large archaeological horizon. Its origins were in Sakha, in the Lena river basin. From there it spread both to the east and to the west."
"Alcoholic beverages have long been known to serve an important socio-cultural function in ancient societies, including at ritual feasts. A new study finds evidence of beer drinking 9,000 years ago in southern China, which was likely part of a ritual to honor the dead. The findings are based on an analysis of ancient pots found at a burial site at Qiaotou, making the site among the oldest in the world for early beer drinking. The results are reported in PLOS ONE." Source: Dartmouth.
Note: I'm not sure where this burial site is located beyond the fact that it's in the Yangtze River Valley of southern China. There are several towns named Qiaotou in China, one of which, incidentally, is known as the "button capital of the world" because it produces something like 60 percent of the world's clothing buttons.