Come for the Harvest, Stay for the Beer: Alcohol Production in an Ubaid Household in Upper Mesopotamia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In New Perspectives on Household Archaeology, Bradley Parker and Catherine Foster urged archaeologists to approach households as a dynamic location of repetitive actions and gestures that shaped the formation of the personal, economic, social, political and ideological trajectories of the community. In his contribution to the volume, Bradley sought to marshal multiple lines of archaeological evidence to provide a comprehensive account of the activities that occurred within an Ubaid household at Kenan Tepe on the Upper Tigris River in southeastern Turkey and explored how these actions were connected to broad changes in social integration and political complexity throughout Greater Mesopotamia during the fifth millennium BCE. In this paper, I will reexamine Bradley's conclusions using new data provided by a use-alteration analysis of the ceramics from the Ubaid household. This analysis has revealed evidence for the household production and consumption of alcohol, most likely beer, during the late 5th millennium BCE. This paper will explore the nature of alcohol production at the site and connect it to the activities identified in Parker’s analysis of the structure as well as the social and political relationships formed during the consumption of alcohol at Ubaid Kenan Tepe.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23229