Drink Read Free Page B

surprisingly quick to spread from the Middle East to northern Europe. In the same centurythat King Scorpion was accumulating jars of Levantine wine for his afterlife, the inhabitants of a distant island surrounded by a cold sea were making merry on truly psychoactive brews. The cultivation of cereals had reached Germany by 5000 BC and Britain a few centuries later. Crops originating in the Fertile Crescent had appeared in the Orkney Islands in the far north of Scotland by about 3800 BC, where they were used to make beer. It is not known if the Scottish discovered fermentation independently, or whether the process traveled alongside the Middle Eastern cereals they employed in their brews.
    The settlement of Skara Brae in the Orkneys, whose stone dwellings have been preserved by virtue of having been buried beneath a sand dune for many thousands of years, provides much in the way of circumstantial evidence about the drinking habits of its Neolithic population. Pottery jars with a capacity of up to thirty gallons have been found in several dwellings, and the analysis of a greenish slime in the bottom of one such vessel confirms that it held an alcoholic beverage made from barley and oats, which had been flavored with meadowsweet and spiced up with deadly nightshade, henbane, and hemlock. These last additives are hallucinogenic, and lethal in the right quantities. Henbane induces blurred vision, dilated pupils, rapid heartbeat, dizziness, nausea, euphoria, and hallucinations in very small doses; hemlock is best know as a neurotoxin that paralyzes before it kills; and deadly nightshade, three juicy berries of which can be fatal, speeds the pulse and gives its consumer the sensations of flight. Clearly, the inhabitants of Skara Brae were drinking for effect rather than to satisfy their hunger or their thirsts.
    Other Neolithic sites throughout the British Isles also provide evidence of both alcohol and drunkenness. At Durrington Walls, for instance, a settlement adjacent to Stonehenge, many hearths have been uncovered that are distinguished by the quantity of animal bones and smashed pottery vessels they contain—clearly visitors to the sacred complex feasted long and drank deep. Indeed, it is likely that a culture of intoxication existed in Britain and much of Europe prior to the introduction of cereal crops and beer. Paleobotanical remains, and the entoptic phenomena depicted in cave paintings dating to more than thirty thousand years ago, show that its inhabitants consumed cannabis and opium poppies for pleasure. It is easy to understand how alcohol was welcomed as a new method of generating an altered state of consciousness.
    The conceit that the purpose of alcoholic beverages was to make people drunk rather than merely to nourish them was also apparent on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean during the late Neolithic era, notably among the Mayans of Central America. The Mayans were a sophisticated civilization who, by 1000 BC, had established large cities with monumental architecture and who had developed the arts to a very high degree of excellence. They were a mead-drinking culture, who flavored their mead with the bark of the balche tree. In addition to collecting wild honey, they kept hives of a native species of stingless bees in and around their huts to provide a secure source of raw materials for their brews. They also made a fermented drink from corn, whose intoxicating properties are confirmed in their creation myth, the Popol Vuh. Mayan drinking appears to have been a ceremonial as well as hedonistic activity. It was an act of communicating with the spirit world, and compulsory on certain ritual occasions. They do, however, seem to have viewed drunkenness in a comical as well as serious light, and produced beautiful glazed cups, some of which depict humorous scenes of drinkers, and also grotesque pottery figurines of inebriates.
    Similar evidence as to the preparation of alcoholic drinks in ancient times has been