Beer ‘Chicha’ Helped To Keep Peruvian Wari Empire Stable – New Study

Conny Waters - Ancient Pages.com - Archaeologists have studied remnants of the Wari culture and found that beer was of great importance to these ancient people.

In fact, beer helped keep the empire stable.

A thousand years ago, the Wari empire stretched across Peru. At its height, it covered an area the size of the Eastern seaboard of the US from New York City to Jacksonville. It lasted for 500 years, from 600 to 1100 AD, before eventually giving rise to the Inca.

The team worked with Peruvian brewers to recreate the ancient chicha recipe used at Cerro Baul. Imaghe: Donna Nash

"This study helps us understand how beer fed the creation of complex political organizations," Ryan Williams, an associate curator and Head of Anthropology at the Field Museum, said in a press release.

"We were able to apply new technologies to capture information about how ancient beer was produced and what it meant to societies in the past."

Nearly twenty years ago, Williams, Donna Nash, and their team discovered an ancient Wari brewery in Cerro Baúl in the mountains of southern Peru.

"It was like a microbrewery in some respects. It was a production house, but the brewhouses and taverns would have been right next door," explains Williams. And since the beer they brewed, a light, sour beverage called chicha, was only good for about a week after being made, it wasn't shipped offsite—people had to come to festivals at Cerro Baúl to drink it.

These festivals were important to Wari society—between one and two hundred local political elites would attend, and they would drink chicha from three-foot-tall ceramic vessels decorated to look like Wari gods and leaders.

See also:

Peru’s Wari Culture And Their Ancient ‘Amunas’ Will Help Peru’s Water

"People would have come into this site, in these festive moments, in order to recreate and reaffirm their affiliation with these Wari lords and maybe bring tribute and pledge loyalty to the Wari state," says Williams.

To learn more about the beer and its importance, researchers used several techniques, including one that involved shooting a laser at a shard of a beer vessel to remove a tiny bit of material, and then heating that dust to the temperature of the surface of the sun to break down the molecules that make it up.

Then, they analyzed fragments of ceramic beer vessels, and checked the ingredients in chicha. The vessels were made of clay that came from nearby, and two, the beer was made of pepper berries, an ingredient that can grow even during a drought. Both these things would help make for a steady beer supply, no matter weather conditions and trade obstacles.

The Wari beer was an important cultural practice that clearly unified people.

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Written by Conny Waters – AncientPages.com Staff Writer