Stephen Batiuk | Exploring the Roots of the Vine: The History and Archaeology of the Earliest Wines

[Applause] thank you very much this is an incredible crowd I want to begin by thanking well everybody at the O I for for salt inviting me this is an incredible honor and gretel-ann rate for for choosing me as the Braidwood scholar I think you've probably heard this from so many archaeologists but Rainwood has been a bit of a personal Idol for for most of my career so that you there aren't really words I really express how I feel about this so thank you very much all right so let's get this started shall we there's so much stuff in our life that we really sort of take for granted without really thinking about where they come from what their backstory might be and what effect they might have had on history and culture throughout time wine I would argue is one such thing it's been a prime and powerful mover in human civilization both in sacred and the profane when one thinks of something like wine it immediately invokes linkages to specific cultures like France Italy Spain it's something that pretty much every culture partakes of or has partake enough at some point of their history it's often tied to concepts of luxury you should watch TV why in played an important role in ancient societies and continues to do so even today but what exactly is the history of this illustrious cultural beverage now the history of wine is actually quite all this we're obviously going to find out more tonight most people understand of course that the Greeks brought their wines to Italy and the Romans took their wines to the Gauls Marseille was actually one of the first French regions to be introduced to Roman Roman vines although many forgets actually with the Phoenicians who brought vineyards to North Africa Sardinia and Spain nowadays some countries such as the USA Canada of course South Africa South America Australia and now even northern Europe and China are increasing their wining production and of course consumption but how much further back can we push its history technical difficulties now when you dig through Western judeo-christian culture you already have hints at the greater antiquity of wine now according to the Bible the first thing Noah did after the flood was plant a vineyard on Mount Ararat which is in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus then he made wine and became drunk so drunk that he actually passes out naked as you do in his tent I see Jim nodding quietly there and he's seeing naked by his son ham when Noah realizes that ham is seen as naked of course curses oddly enough hams son Canaan what's interesting though is the theme and the geography is paralleled in many ancient cultures with a hero such as say with nappy sh-boom Arthur ha seus Ziusudra surviving a flood that I'm sent by the gods and landing on a mountain say your mountain is sir and the Babylonian versions and which appears to have been roughly at the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers so eastern Anatolia and Caucasia and of course one of the first things that is either discovered or planted our grapes and wine is always made the Iranians even have their own interesting little story you have JumpShip he's a he's a mythological Iranian King known from the Avesta texts and he's credited with discovering the fermentation of wine apparently the way the story goes is that Jung she loved eating grapes and he had a large collection in his storerooms one day he sent two servants down to go get some grapes for him to snack on and while the servants were in the room they basically were overcome by some mystical fumes pass out and almost died probably from the co2 of the fermentation process the grapes were then deemed as poisonous and the room was locked no one was allowed to go in there then there's sort of two versions of the story either one of his harem girls becomes despondent and suicidal because she has a chronic headache or because she was actually the other one that she was rejected by the king and so she decides that she's gonna commit suicide and she knows that there's this poisonous vat down in the basement so she she breaks in drink some of this poison and proceeded proceeded to get drunk I guess that's one way of getting rid of your headache so freed of her depression she and juice introduces this drink to the king who falls in love with this newly discovered beverage but what's the reality well what we have here is that what we call the the Paleolithic hypothesis that was really sort of put forward a lot by Patrick McGovern who is really sort of the the Godfather of anything about ancient alcohol so ever and that basically the discovery of the fermentation of grapes and berries is an accident probably that happened with the early hunting-gathering societies now we have to understand is that the yeast that is necessary for the fermentation of grape juice into wine grows naturally on the grapes themselves and portation fermentation happens spontaneously naturally all the time and what he suggests is that humans probably would have observed animals such as birds or something like that flying all askew because they'd been snacking on some berries that it started to ferment and humans being humans decided I'll give that a try or perhaps the idea is that they'd collected a bunch of grapes in some sort of vessels been crushed by the natural weight of the berries and then the juice had fermented at the bottom and when they got to the bottom of the fat they of course decided I'll drink that eventually either through intentionally well eventually intentionally squeezing and making more of this delicious liquid collecting it essentially what you need to come away from with this is that wine is natural it just wants to be made and we would have discovered it and we did actually numerous times wherever grapes grow and so therein lies the issue the key to understanding the history of wine is understanding the indigenous environment of the plant in question so where do grapes grow well you can see on the map here great white wide area the wild grapevine has a wide distribution across the Middle East and Mediterranean world it's a hardy plant that can survive and thrive in many different environments and there are somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 varieties of grapes that are found throughout the entire world which can of course be used to produce a dizzying array of products from just simple fruits to syrups to vinegar and of course wine it would appear that the grape was domesticated several times of course in different regions but based on the number of domesticated varieties present in the region today there are about sick I think at last count we are somewhere over 600 native varieties to Georgia alone versus the whopping 23 that they have in the great wine land of France so it's believed that because you have this vast variety of grapes it's because they've been interbreeding for such a long time that this is where grapes were first domesticated in Caucasia modern Georgia Armenia and eastern Turkey but the question of course is when did they start making wine so our earliest evidence for ancient wine actually has a great little Canadian connection and a U of T connection yes the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum excavations at the site of go Dean Tepe in in central western Iran headed by the late Steve hire young revealed a town southern Mesopotamia non troppo dated to about the 4th millennium BC and in the excavations they discovered a number of these storage doors that you see here this is the one that's on the display in the wrong that had this yellowish liquid well yellowish residue I should say at the bottom of the vessel and it was because of this vessel that Pat McGovern in conjunction with a number of chemists developed the test to look for the chemical signature that would be left behind from wine they discovered that all the vessels produced evidence of tartaric acid which showed that they had at one point contained some sort of grape liquid but it was the presence of terebinth resin that suggested that that liquid was wine essentially what you're looking at here is an ancient Greek resina many Matina come from the terebinth resin that is put inside of it later examination of a by McGovern by a material from a Neolithic site called Faru stepping in in sort of northwestern Iran by Lake Urmia needed to between five thousand four hundred and five thousand BC produced similar evidence of an ancient art Sina pushing wine production back to the Neolithic now in the 1970s the Georgian National Museum and the Institute of archeology of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences were instituted a number of excavations particularly at the site of Shula various gora near the modern town of McNeely in in Georgia the excavations led by Alexander Ibaka Schilling who in just about every photo I see of him looks like Popeye revealed five levels of a Neolithic village the village consisted of a series of circular mud brick structures varying in size from about one to four meters in diameter but also found in the excavations were some carbonized grape seeds which led Pat McGovern to samples some of the vessels are fragments of the vessels from that were found in the excavations which tentatively produced evidence of tartaric acid suggesting that the blind production the caucuses could perhaps we push back as far as 5,800 BC one of the key problems is that the tartaric acid you couldn't really say whether it was the result of something that was in the soil or something that actually belonged on the shirt so that was why there was always the ambiguity so this leads us to the new research that I'm involved with in conjunction with the government of the Republic of Georgia a project known as the research and the popularization of the Georgian grape and wine culture it's a bit of a mouthful hunt I'm not sure how we can make that any better now drinking in particular wine is an integral part of Georgian culture and pervades it's way more than French Italian or other sort of Western European societies honestly I wish there was a way to properly introduce it to you although I would actually say that there was a good documentary that was done by a couple of people in Chicago that was just released this last March called our blood is wine which if you can find it on I think they were selling it on Amazon or something like that it gives you a very good concept of what wine means to Georgians but one thing I can tell you is that drinking wine in Georgia is an endurance sport so Georgian wines are unique for the way that they are traditionally made what's known as the query method named after the clay pot that they are traditionally fermented it aged the wine is what makes a different is that the wine is fermented on the must the skins and the seeds and the stems all of them are put together into this vessel and they sit there for anywhere between three weeks or eight months the quality themselves are specialized vessels they have a very distinctive shape and they are often quite large largest when I saw I think you could probably drive the car into and they're usually buried into the ground up to their necks now these characteristics have a special role in their function when you have them buried in the ground and you have a different basically a temperature differentiation between the air and the ground itself actually creates convection currents which are amplified by the shape of the wine and so what that does is it keeps the wine in circulation keeps it in contact with the skins for much longer which is what gives Georgian wines an incredible body to them now the quality themselves have a long history going back for sure in their traditional shape and form attent about the eighth century BC we believe we can sort of push them back well into the Bronze Age as well perhaps not quick the exact same shape and perhaps even into the Neolithic what you're looking at here is well a series that on the top left this is at one of the suspected Neolithic qualities from the site of kanuda gora on the bottom left is the the site of clearly good abbey which is just outside of the the modern town of tbilisi where we actually have our oldest confirmed wine cellar now given the variety of grapes that are found in Caucasia it was understood like I said that they'd been intermixing for a long period of time so this was the logic logical place to look for the earliest evidence for the domestication of grape now excavations have been going on in Georgia under the Soviets since the 30s and as we saw in the ethnic sites we're producing images of these vessels while there's clemmy's de Gotha again where you can see what looks like a cluster of grapes which again was a hint but something might be up here and when archaeologists began to look carefully and examine the botanical remains they were finding like I said like I showed you the odd carbonized seed as well and it was this is what what led there for the examination of one of the sites of Shulamite explora that produced that telltale evidence of why and that is where Suleiman Korres and it's the neighboring site of Gothic really Gora which is the focus of our excavations it's actually well it's a focus of our work I'll be coming back to that a little bit later so this project is funded by the Georgian national government through the Department of Agriculture there they actually have in the Department of Agriculture they have the basically it's the Institute of wine this gives you an idea how seriously they take Uhler wine and it's not just an archaeological project it's multidisciplinary in nature we were working with agronomist DNA specialists palynology s-- paleobotanist climatologists and of course the dirt monkeys the archaeologists all basically trying to work in concerts to understand the antiquity of wine and the production of wine in Georgia and also the role that Georgia played in the spread of the grape varieties that we know today and of course the spread of wine culture so using some of the pollen data basically what we have our viticultural Paleo climate reconstruction that were developed for Georgia resulting in a series of maps showing the growth potential areas of vines in different time periods but you're looking at here from the Neolithic through to the Middle Ages with the late calculus and early Bronze Age containing the most favorable environment their environmental conditions for growing grapes so this is the period for the maximum Greek growth potential and the importance of which will circle back to you later a little bit later the DNA DNA analysis has so far produced some interesting patterns no we haven't been able to get any DNA from any of the ancient seeds it's just not possible but looking at a lot of the modern ones we start to see some interesting patterns first it seems that the Georgian cultivated varieties were crossed red with Asian species which would have resulted in larger grapes and therefore more juice and this their guests based on on on their understanding of the changes in DNA happens sometime around the fifth or fourth millennium second there's this interesting link between Caucasian and East Anatolian cultivars and modern Western European varieties specifically those that are found in Spain Portugal but also North African in Syrian cultivars the importance of which will circle back to at the end so the NATO the late Neolithic period in Caucasia is represented by an archaeological culture that's known as the shul of additional pepe culture we'll just call it s SC for now this culture is found across southeastern Georgia Western Azerbaijan and northern Armenia with the greatest concentration being in the Kreml Carter region where the sights of God that's really gotta entry-level video gotta are found and these two sites are the focus of the archaeological component of this larger project the component has actually run as an archaeological field school for the University of Toronto we began their excavations in 2016 under well what we're calling the gala truly guara regional archaeological project expedition or just because I am that cheesy and I love my acronyms so much easier to say so the site of gravity the Guara is the main focus of the excavation it represents a small Neolithic village about 0.6 hectares in size now cursory examinations begin at the site in about 2002 larger scale excavations began in 2014 I joined it in 20 fifteen and we had our first archaeological fueled school into grape in 2016 with my co-directors Andrew Graham and Mindy edge alabanza now one of the main aims of the excavation is to excavate a large portion of the settlement and to help preserve it and develop it into an archaeological Park to help develop tourism for the modeling will be region in particular but also the Republic of Georgia in general there are two main phases of Neolithic occupation of the site with hints of a third ephemeral calculus early Bronze Age occupation perhaps seasonal ones if you will the Neolithic faces or horizons each produce three sub phases of construction and renovations and are dominated by that scene sort of pattern of circular buildings with the predominance for combining two round structures into this figure-eight pattern now the upper phase phase the upper phase phase one of architecture does appear to be less dense than the lower one but it does have some of the larger structures in this case we have some that are six plus meters in diameter which are probably some of the largest structures for the SSE that are found that have been found yet and these are not found in the lower levels so far how do we understand these larger structures is unclear of course whether it's a result of changes in family size family organization increased wealth wealth or social stratification to will it too early to say check back with us in a couple of years at the same time in 2016 we undertook the smaller soundings at the neighboring sites of Sri lavetta's quota basically untouched since the 1970s one of the main aims was to obtain soil samples to provide that baseline and comparison for McGovern's earlier positive results of wine residue but also to get a better idea of the stratigraphy of the site since the publication is a little dicey if you will and particularly try to understand the relationship between shrila Metis and that's really and also of course try to see if there's any more lower levels that have yet to be investigated so we began by having the slump in fill from the old excavation area removed which was readily visible and then identifying a small corner of architecture in the northwest part of the square which what you're looking at here now the excavations reveal four phases of construction in this operation and these phases seem to have fault with one another in very quick succession the earliest phase of the wall excavated in the test trench was also had and associated in followed by a later phase of the same wall associated with a hearth which I'll again circle back to later on in this talk the west of the north wall showed evidence of significant burning well most of the western section was actually still dominated by fill that we didn't quite get out from the old excavations but at the same time we brought in a steppe trench on the west side of the tell basically trying to get a better idea of this particular fee and give us a chance to go off the mound itself and find some of the earlier levels the steppe trench produced six levels five of which had evidence of architecture and then the sounding on the Southwest at the bottom step revealed another two meters of occupational material that have we just only started to investigate this past year so it shows that occupation continued mainly continuously at the site without much interruption through most of the six millennium the ceramic assemblage recovered from the Chilean chili berry was represented by a small corpus of diagnostic shirts particularly from the lower phases of Gotha truly for some strange reason the upper level has actually very little ceramics which again may be sort of reflective of specialized use of space at the site Shula vadik's does produce a more reasonable collection if you will and the ceramics are being analyzed by UT graduate student by the name of Khalid Abu Jaya the ceramics themselves consist predominantly of steep-walled pots with narrow flat bases often with a basket impression still on the bottom and of course applique decorations with the common sort of knobs crescents we unfortunately haven't sorry that's not true I do have the news photo of the one piece that might be a collection of grape and grapes on the side and these are all basically found at both sites the upper ephemera level that we now understand to belong to the calculus ik produce a number of Sione shirts which is the calculus ik culture of the region as well as a few later kora roxies well actually a core oxys grave suggesting that there is later occupation at the site although probably more seasonal than anything else so the funnel and lithics have yet to be fully examined there's a preponderance of bone tools particularly bone owls but also scrapers and remarkably well that one markedly well-preserved spoon that you can see up there which was intact when we found it but then somebody dropped it and stepped on it yeah yeah that's not quite the words I used some bone handles actually produce evidence of bitumen suggesting they were actually for for happening and gluing some of the lithics for it to form composite tools lithics are almost entirely obsidian consisting of blades blade 'lets and all's we hope to have further information about these different industries in the future of course one of the main aims is to examine for evidence of early wine production which had been suggested but never really substantiate oprius data remember the the aforementioned botanical data although seeds that have been found the different sites well we radiocarbon dated them and they all dated to the 18th century this is where you have to be very careful about contamination so that we were quite despaired by that however our other our well our present flotation sampling program has has really ramped up and we but we also have yet to identify any fittest remains in these collections however our other analyses have began to fill in the gaps in this data set numerous soil samples taken from vessel surfaces and storage bins were analyzed by ELISA koala I'd say at the Georgian National Museum for panel analogical remains so pollen the analysis detected large amounts of grape pollen particularly contained within the storage vessels suggesting that they had contained some sort of great product in these neolithic vessels for identification of the starches and epidermal cells of grapevines as well as the microscopic carrots of small fruit flies you know if you've ever gone collecting fruit or if you drive or even crushed grapes almost immediately you have those tiny little flies that buzz around your fruit finding lots of fragments of them in it as well so combining that together it suggests that what we were looking at here was probably at least good indications that there was wine that had been in these vessels we have additionally of course submitted eleven samples for residue analysis to Patrick McGovern he was part of the project at the University of Pennsylvania since he is the Godfather of all things ancient alcohol and positive results were obtained in six of the 11 samples and not just from one site from both both sites one of the samples actually producing the highest level of tartaric acid McGovern has ever even seen we actually have one good radiocarbon date for tourists they obtained from the exact same locus basically centimeters away from where that one of the positive samples came from at Shula Bettis which give us a two Sigma data 5985 250 805 suggesting that these grapes were collected and being processed into well a secondary product of some case and all the evidence points to wine as early as about 6,000 BC these results were published last November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which you might have seen we got a little bit of press about all over the world even actually making the Guinness Book of World Records that was something I had not anticipated but we also anticipate about further discoveries in in coming years we actually had a couple samples this year that came from the even newer lower levels so we might be pushing back wine production a little bit further and we also have another first in the pipeline if you will we also have evidence perhaps of the oldest use of honey from that hearth that in operation one actual of it is quote so you'll probably be seeing more of us in the future so we have evidence that wine was developed in Caucasia at least by the sixth millennium the interesting question is how did it spread across the ancient world and to that we have an interesting little possibility here now the 4th millennium saw the development of urbanism and organized long-distance trade in the Near East which linked southern Mesopotamia with Iran Eastern and Eastern Anatolia at the same time it saw the development in south Caucasia of what will eventually be one of those widespread and longest lasting cultures in the near eastern archaeology what's often known as the early Transcaucasian culture or the core Iraq sees culture ism this culture is distinguished by its highly recognizable and distinct ceramics they are all basically handmade all heavily burnished and frequently decorated with this red and black color combination as well as having ribbing or incision by the third millennium this culture can be found over a large swath of the Near East that's that purple blob that you see on the map there now because of its wide distribution it was quote-unquote discovered early last century several times by many different archaeologists many of whom had little contact with each other it definitely did not speak the same languages as a result this culture has been given several different regional names kora Roxy's culture in South Caucasia yannick culture in in Iran Nakata's culture in eastern Anatolia red black burnished ware culture thanks to Braidwood in well northern Syria and the cubic Arab culture in Palestine now this obviously nomenclature is a little a little bit of a problem if you will and so we now call it the core Iraq sees cultural tradition just to make things a little bit easier or KAC I like my acronyms I'm sorry so to make a long story short or at least a long and boring dissertation short the distribution of the KAC is wide and the reason for its presence in these all these different areas varies from situation to situation well we can say is that some isolated examples are probably the result of trade and there's definitely cases of copying or emulation but the overall pattern that we have fits well well a pattern of small-scale immigration probably originally the result of traders or passional nomads followed later by small farmers who slowly integrate on the outside of indigenous settlement systems and what has been described as a diaspora community living alongside these indigenous communities in a sort of a symbiotic relationship now one of the most remarkable features about the KAC culture is that it's staunchly conservative in nature living as foreign groups in inlands for significant periods of time in Caucasia the cultures around around for about 1,000 to 1,200 years eastern anatolia about 800 years syria Mesopotamia oh sorry sir Mesopotamia about 800 years Palestine close to 400 the question is how is this done how can these foreigners the KAC lived side by side with these people for such a long period of time and not to come into contact with our conflict with over resources what are these people doing in these new homelands what is the economic niche these people are fitting into that's one of the big questions now after historic studies have shown that with rare exceptions migrants tend to move into territories which they are pre adapted in plain English generally margit migrants move into territories in which they are used to where they can grow familiar crops they're used to the weather etc so the distribution of Karachi settlements across the Near East show clear patterning in settlement with occupation and similar Geographic and environmental settings and when you look at the wide distribution you really wouldn't think that but when you actually do break it down there is a lot of similarity the different regions that they settle in are all rich in agricultural potential and of different crop choice but the key thing is that that they have they all have basically wide agricultural potential that is many of the crops that are many crops that are not indigenous to this area can be brought in and grown there so these migrants are settling into an ecological niche that they are specially suited to either culturally technologically or with their economic activities the question of a court the course is which crop I think you can see where I'm going here when you overlay the distribution of where grapes grow naturally with the distribution of the kuraki settlements a striking pattern emerges you can see here there's most of them really sort of fit into that strange little purple zone where the grapes will grow naturally is this mine yeah there we go there is of course this large blob here where they are not found but that's a there's actually a different argument for that that I can't really go into but it deals with a sort of subset of the core oxys culture that were probably dealing more with pastoral nomadism so we're looking at a culture coming from an area with a long history of wine production emerging if you remember in the climactic optimum of grape production in Caucasians so the key the the core oxys culture probably would have had that and viticulture in there economic tool belt now what you have to keep in mind is that hora cultural pursuits require a different set of skills rather than agriculture there's a lot more human intervention not just in the propagation of the species but the selection of desirable traits care and maintenance viticultural is particularly more labor-intensive it's a year-round pursuit requires greater investment and takes a long time to learn if learned how to identify about how to protect the protective plans from pests fungi bacteria it's not something that everybody can learn but it's intensive knowledge that has to be well as best handed down that sort of the family level the end project of course can vary you could have fruit raisins syrup vinegar but the benefits of the domesticated variety can be found in a luxury item that would have been in demand by the elites in the developing urban centers of the Near East in the third millennium the timing is just right so why keep in mind wine is a finite commodity only a limited amount can actually be made maintained every year so that kind of gives it a high status but it's also kind of renewable at the same time you can still grow more in the next year once you run out so this hypothetical viticultural economic niche is what probably allowed the core oxys to remain independent and retain their cultural distinctiveness for such a long period of time because they were basically living us apart from the rest of the people working and producing their own crop that the others couldn't really do so if a closed shop if you will and this might explain what's happening in the archaeological record so we've got evidence of of wine production in in in the caucuses what can we actually link to wine production with the core roxies themselves so so some of our earliest evidence comes from this cave site in Armenia called out anyone it's been excavated for a number of years by a joint American Armenian team previously known of course for having the the best and oldest preserved shoe what you're looking at there but now actually what you have on the right tucked away in the back is perhaps the earliest evidence of wine production or at least the oldest wine press that you see here and found possibly in association with core oxys ceramics I say possibly because there's a lot of stratigraphic debate amongst the archaeologists right now oh sorry this is some of the great pits that were for her buying fine pieces and great tips that were actually found in the vessels when they were excavating them however I believe some of our most prolific evidence comes from the kuraki ceramics themselves the ceramic repertoire although there is differentiation in the ceramics throughout that whole large distribution zone there's a series of forms that can be found throughout and these I would suggest represent a wine kit or a collection of vessels for the preparing and serving of wine now what do I mean by a wine kits well okay we'll do informal poll here how many people raise your hands how many people have different classes for red or white wine different glasses for champagne wine bucket decanters anybody have a saber no sabotage really I finally have one person saber for life for opening line you had me excited there for a moment where's the art in that so what we have here are drinking bowls and storage guards and these are the ones that are almost always decorated with that red and black color combination they're also heavily burnished and exhibit the same sort of well we call it a chimeric the shape and this is again we thank Braidwood for this wonderful term basically just an s-shaped curve to the vessel itself and often they will have a little um phallus base little button on the bottom that actually can hold your fingers in better for when you're drinking what's interesting is that this shape this s-shaped curve will eventually start to be copied in in the later local ceramics as well we also have these jars that that are that well that could for storage for some kind they're always they're always decorated if you will often also have this weird angle that they sit down I haven't quite figured out what that is about which could be or suggesting early weapon ease or wine storage vessels they only sit about 60 liters or something like that so they're a little smaller than I would like but we're still trying to sort that out it's going on so can we actually say that these things held wine well in examining some of these these chimera jars from from Ty not actually these ones are actually excavated by the Oh exclamations back in the 1930s that are sitting in the untucking museum today we see this on the inside here it's basically a spalling pattern that from what we understand actually is is something that shows up on all later sort of vessels that we use for storing wine for amphoras and stuff like that because what you have is the wine will be put in there and it'll still sometimes ferment a little bit the wine will actually sort of permeate the clay and then as the co2 is released it sort of spoils off little chunks of clay on the inside so it believes this telltale pattern and it's showing up on quite a lot of these jars back in 2014 when I first was invited over to Georgia they basically opened up the storerooms of the National the National Museum and I was poking around all their vessels there and you have the same Telltale's pattern on a lot of these store jars in Georgia as well so although this is not as definitive as residue analysis this methodology suggests that these came in reqtest storage jars were used for storing some sort of fermented liquid gimen our data that we've been pulling together I think we can cover Tilly suggests that this was probably why one final a little bit of evidence that really sort of links the core oxys culture and wine is actually a bit of new data I think it's in the middle of coming out in press but Paula no logical investigations from two zoomorphic writer that were obtained from the excavations of the dahlias Goya in Georgia basically it's a core oxy Cemetery where they found a couple of these vessels that were deposited in the in the graves showed that same pollen spectra for Y suggesting that these things probably were used in some sort of funerary rites of a-kor roxies funeral ok so we have our evidence that the core oxys might have had something to do with wine production the question is what effect does this have on them and the indigenous cultures that they're living with in these regions that they migrate into so here we're coming back to the Mucca plane where the oh I and Braidwood himself originally excavated now the University of Toronto has sort of taken over the excavations at tying knots where we have a perfect test case to see how it actually affected everybody but we actually won't be looking at timeout itself we'll be looking at the data from a teller China which oh I actually was excavating it as well for a number of years so the middle a Bronze Age period of a China sorry China was executed by the British under Sir Leonard Woolley large swathes of palaces were uncovered in the excavations and will he also uncovered a great number of tablets did middle late bronze age at this point all Locke was sort of the capital of this kingdom of Mukesh and a vassal state of Yamaha JIT said the modern city of Aleppo now the large collection of tablets give us a lot of idea are a lot of data regarding the settlements of the regions and their associated fields but more importantly for us their vineyards as well the what weather are called the El loc census list they record the number of feet or or E or B two households at the different settlements and they tell us which households or the tabla sells how much of a vineyard each household actually had so one household had one equal vineyard which is about 0.63 hectares of a vineyard now if you estimate the number of household you can identify the amount of vineyards and so this is actually some work that was initially started by Jesse Cassano a former oh I student and when you look at it when you dig through the census list you have 19 this you have small sites if you do the math it would have 19 hectares of vines medium sized sites would have 31 hectares of vines and the large sites would have 95 hectares of vines using basically Hittite Late Bronze Age tau texts that talk about how much one can be produced from a coup of vineyard you can sort of calculate how much is actually done so our smaller sites the 19 hectares of ions could produce eleven thousand four hundred liters of wine this is of course provided that all the grapes and go towards one in production our medium-sized we do 18600 our largest site would produce 57,000 liters of wine the texts show 80 small sights ten medium sights and three large which suggests that the MOOC region alone could produce 1 million two hundred and sixty nine thousand liters of wine a year or to put in something that's more relatable to us one point six nine million seven hundred fifty milliliter bottle so standard wine bottles a year not an absence of substantial amount of wine now how can we compare this to the early Bronze Age so if you overlay using the settlement data overlay the core oxys settlements with that of the the middle and late bronze age you can see that there is a lot of correlation you have a lot of sites that overlap if you will and suggest at least that the core actions culture probably could have actually produced an equal or even greater amount of wine in the early Bronze Age and then actually is another little piece of evidence this is from our excavations at Stuy not if you remember James the the pod but the pit of despair is it was affectionately called here you have basically this is a wine press and a jar that would have collected the wine as was pressed yeah so we can actually say that in the early Bronze Age and they are making wine at the site so these core oxy sites have the potential to Creek create a lot of wine and these people were living on these small farm States outside the cities producing this needed commodity and it's probably this is what allowed the core axis to remain independent for so long and preserve their culture for such a long time and maybe the core oxys culture or their wine culture at least had an effect on the Sarah Mesopotamian cultures as well but do we see evidence of this so the 4th millennium roughly sees the introduction of the quarter oxys culture into northwestern Syria and with their little distinctive wine kit now over period as I said earlier you can see that at the beginning before in the phase G period so the lake helpful if Xperia Duende are just coming in there are no drinking cups in the local assemblage when the Korat sees come in they have their distinctive kit and eventually as I said we start to see them emulating these same drinking bowls over time as you move on through the early Bronze Age it's Casey early b23 we seemed explosion in drinking paraphernalia that emerges in the non-core Roxy ceramics you can see all the goblets here and then the jars at first in this early period they seemed to be only confined to elite contexts if you will and then finally by vb4 drinking vessels are found all over in on a beach settings and these vessels spread all throughout Sara Mesopotamia but the question is of course how do we know that these guys are actually drinking wine out of these cups because you know after all this is a Mesopotamia essentially this is you know the the land of beer Greek traditions hold the Dionysus visited Mesopotamia once and only once and ran away screaming because they didn't have any wine never to come back again apparently you know in the Gilgamesh epic tablet two beers described it as the law of the land it's one of the aspects of civilization that tamed Enkidu well beer and prostitutes but that's a whole other area of research I think the new Ailish talks about drinking beers from straws and you have scenes from well in this case here the while various spoons on seals where they are drinking beer or drinking stuff from straws from vessels here you actually hit one here here you actually have a nice silver straw that was actually came from the tomb of Aden and if you just want sort of a frame of reference are you gonna come here a little ethnographic photo a bunch of of kiddie key so west african tribesmen who are sitting around a giant pot of beer drinking through straws drinking beer in groups these straws is found in all forms of Mesopotamian art you can see it here I'm here except for well what's that guy doing there he's got something a little bit different there it is again these guys here these they're drinking something more than beer what's going on here well of course well the argument was that for a long time they were probably drinking date wine but Sumerian Akkadian actually have a word for a great wine as opposed to deep wine in this case here you can see sort of the evolution of the signs themselves Sumerian guests in the Akkadian caught on you the top left is your Sumerian symbol for for a while or your earliest I guess maybe late work symbol for wine often been suggested that that comes from a great group cluster of grapes or perhaps actually a jar I think I like that idea a little bit better so they clearly had an idea of great great wine so what do the textual records actually tell us about wine and Mesopotamian societies well in southern Mesopotamia Iraq and the third millennium it's exceedingly rare but in the north that's a totally different story Cyril Mesopotamia in the third millennium dominate of course by the by the city of Ebla city-state of Ebla and more importantly for us it's very close to us in the amok now in the records from from eppela consumption of wine is wide and it grows over time and as it appears that as wine becomes more common in society production actually becomes more centralized first by the regional centers and later by eppela itself though texts actually describe a wine that's being delivered by a plates who are actually going out into the countryside to collect it usually coming from regions nearby but also actually afar coming up from probably the karkemish area as well sometimes they're brought to the to the palace sometimes the palace confiscates it but it seems to me that people are actually drinking wine fairly wilee and this is the period where we start to see the the wine vessels popping up in sort of the elite quarters if you will of society as you move into the next period where we start to see the spread of drinking vessels throughout the the northwest cereal wine is basically being drinking and being drunken by more and more people and what I suggest is that as production starts to get centralized what the wine production is taking out of the hands of our little independent corps oxys vintners and they're viticultural villages robbed of their little economic niche they lose their cultural cohesion that allowed their culture truths basically to resist and survive for such a long time and they slowly you basically fade into the cultural background in the second millennium wine as we see well why don't we see become much more cemented at a common Everage for all if you will Mari is of course a major Depot a distributor of wine they're sending ship shipments of wine down to sip our in Iraq the the records talk about wine being sent as royal gifts to Mario or from Mari for various kings and more interesting for us actually we have detailed tablets from the wine traders where they not only tell us where they're getting their wine from from karkemish and also from the Aleppo area but also from the hammer area Horeb being area as well so they're ranging far to get their wine and they also give us an idea how profitable wine trade is so these guys are going up north to the sort of the the cartoonish area there but they're paying one checkol for six jars of wines or about 180 liters of wine for for one shekel when these guys come to Mari they're selling those same bottles of wine for two-and-a-half shekels and when those jars get down to sip are they're selling the same for four so it's quite profitable or it can be for some I suppose so summing up if you will the sixth millennium sees the birth of sort of identity culture in the caucuses by the fourth millennium wine is actually one of the commodities that's starting to be traded from Iran in southeastern Anatolia the third and the second millennium saw a similar pattern but we'll start to eventually see more centralization of production over time particularly at places like abla and mari wine becomes a lot more common throughout the second millennium well specifically in the north but still not so common or at least not as pervasive in society in southern Mesopotamia production release sort of hits its peak in the iron age if you will about 1,000 I see now at this point the Phoenicians who are from the northern eleventeen world and if you really want to generalize or essentially sort of a continuation of the Bronze Age civilizations of Ebla and Mari they become the major wine producers and traders their ships ply the Mediterranean filled with a mitre Phoenician wine amphora and their wine is made from grapes that appear to bear direct genetic lines to grapes from the caucuses in eastern Anatolia a variety that's known as victus vinifera hansika this Phoenicians also established wine industries in places like Sicily Sardinia North Africa Spain and Portugal which if you remember back to the beginning of the talk parallels nicely with the genetic data that was emerging from our studies perhaps we're looking at varieties from Caucasia that were maybe initially brought by our oxys mark mut migrants brought into serie mesopotamia and they continued to thrive throughout the Bronze Age into the Iron Age and they are then eventually transported west across the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians and we see that genetic echo even today in wines coming from Spain and Italy our Spain and Portugal the same time as the Phoenicians of course in East wine in the rest of the Sierra Mesopotamia as well has become a common beverage now under the Assyrians wine is a major tribute item coming from places like bills on applied like Vaughan but more importantly again oaky which is tigh not in the amok for the commemoration of call foo in modern Nimrod the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal ii demanded 10,000 skins of wine for the party alone the under the under the same king the harbor and the belief of northern syria become major wine production centers garde Ramnath the Assyrian capital are filled with vines and we have images of drinking or attendance holding sticks and leading hounds under trees suspended by grapes that really sort of permeate Assyrian art my favorite of course is is the one here where you have King Ashurbanipal and his and his wife after Shara they're kind of having perhaps one of the earlier symposia if you will sitting on their couch drinking wine through again one of these little bowls that has a little um plus base at the bottom very much like our core Roxy's bowls basically enjoying their wine unknown that they like us even today are enjoying the fruits of a migration out of Caucasia so enclosing grape would like to thank our hard-working team made all of these remarkable achievements possible and of course our sponsors the University of Toronto the Georgian National Museum the Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Georgia the Georgian national wine agency the Georgian national wine Association I told you they take it very seriously better and most especially the Ministry of cultural and monuments protections for providing us with our permission to conduct our research thank you [Applause]

Channel: The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures

Views: 17,509

Keywords: Wine, Georgia, Archaeology, biomolecular, genetics, archaeology, Neolithic, kvevri

Id: sWVY2g0JyjI

Length: 54min 37sec (3277 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 07 2018