Drinking the Diaspora: An Archaeological Investigation into the Maintenance of Traditional Tigrayan Brewing Practices by Emigrant Ethiopians in British Columbia, Canada

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: that malty, effervescent drink has been brewing alongside humanity since before written records. Humans today are just as interested in making and consuming beer as they have been in the ancient past. For some people today, beer can serve the same function as it has in the past, being an extra source of calories and safer to drink than untreated water. This reliance on beer is sometimes the case for Tigrayan peoples, living in the remote highlands of Northern Ethiopia where the local beer, Sua, is a dietary staple. Sua, a sorghum beer, and its brewing methods are unique to the Tigrayan highlands. The knowledge of brewing traditional Sua is rapidly disappearing as more Western-style, commercially brewed beers dominate the once community-based market. In this paper, I present the preliminary findings of a recent two-part study to document the traditional knowledge of Ethiopian women who brew this traditional sorghum/millet beer, and experimentally assess its archaeological visibility through starch and phytolith remains on the brewing vessel. This research focuses on the preservation of traditional brewing knowledge and centralizing the women who maintain these practices, as well as facilitating the archaeological identification of indigenous, non-barley-based beers.

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): 37243.0