Beer, Pots, and Caste: A Tale of Two Sites in the Gamo Highlands of Southwestern Ethiopia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood: A Global Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Beer is an essential culinary food for many African societies today and in the past for daily meals, economic compensation, and ritual feasting. This paper focuses on the ethnoarchaeology and archaeology in the Gamo region of southwest Ethiopia located on the western escarpment of the Great Rift Valley. Today, a unique cultural feature of the Gamo is their strict caste system, which forces artisans such as potters, leather workers, ironsmiths, and ground stone producers into a full-time specialization. Ethnoarchaeological analysis of Gamo pottery is compared to the Garu (eighteenth and nineteenth century CE) and Ochollo Mulato (1270–1950 CE) pottery assemblages to interpret functional and social changes in the Gamo region. The archaeological analysis of the two historic sites suggests that the inhabitants were engaged in distinct occupations, with households occupying different levels of the Gamo social hierarchy based on the pottery attributes in association with beer.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood: A Global Archaeology of Beer   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36289.0