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Elite women were alcoholic brewers in pre-Inca Peru By Aaron Hoover University of Florida news release November 14, 2005 GAINESVILLE, Fla. — If the ancient mountaintop city in southern Peru was the vanished Wari empire's unique imperial showplace, the brewery was its piece de resistance. Outfitted with fire pits and large stones that supported huge ceramic vats, it had the capacity to churn out weekly batches of hundreds of gallons of brew a highly impractical alcoholic delicacy, given the city's perch thousands of feet above the nearest water source. The finding suggests the brewers who made the brew — based on a pepper tree berry and known today as chicha — were wealthy women of the highest social class. "The brewers were not only women, but elite women," said Donna Nash, an adjunct curator at The Field Museum and one of a team of archaeologists who have spent years excavating the remnants of the city atop a mesa known today as Cerro Baúl. "They weren't slaves, and they weren't people of low status. So the fact that they made the beer probably made it even more special."
"This is the only place where two empires were making face-to-face contact, and it's that contact that helps explain this site it's both defensible and very impressive," said Mike Moseley, a UF distinguished professor of anthropology and originator of the Baúl research. The broken and whole shawl pins look like long needles with flattened heads. Fires under the brewing urns would have warmed up the room, suggesting one possibility for why the pins were left on the floor. "Several shawl pins in the boiling room were found on the floor mixed in ash from the boiling fires, suggesting they may have been lost during use," said Ryan Williams, assistant curator of anthropology at The Field Museum and leader of the Baúl research. "Perhaps the heat forced the brewers to remove their shawls, and the pins were lost in the process."
The discovery of the shawl pins is important in part because it suggests a historical antecedent to Incan customs recorded by Spanish observers after conquest in the 15th century. Those accounts describe Incan noble women as the society's top brewers and most skilled weavers. The finding is also noteworthy because it adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that women in Incan and pre-Incan Andean societies in general had greater authority than they are historically credited for. Susan deFrance, a UF assistant professor of anthropology, noted that cultural biases tainted Spanish accounts of Incan practices. "So much of Incan social organization got interpreted in history through Spanish eyes," she said. Women may not have been equals as we understand the term, but male-female society "was definitely less segregated than we would imagine." Current indigenous Andean drinking culture may carry on traditions rooted in Wari history, deFrance added. Contrasting Western traditions, men and women drink together, and women don't hold back. "There's a lot of equality in terms of how men and women drink in the highlands of Andes," she said. "Women will get as rip-roaring drunk, if not more so, than men." This article is based on a press release from the University of Florida. The original version appears at Archaeologists: Ancient brewery tended by elite, female brewmasters
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Drinking chicha in Peru
Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru
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