Maya Ritual Beverages: Unveiling the Ingredients for an Ancient Alcoholic Offering

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Balché is a ritual beverage elaborated with honey and tree bark that, during many centuries, has been fundamental for Maya religious rituals in Yucatán, as documented in precolumbian codices, historical sources, and ethnographic research. Some information at the Madrid Codex indicates that honey and/or balché may have been kept in pottery jars. Although Spanish religious authorities prohibited and persecuted its elaboration and consumption during the colony, Maya ritual specialists continued with its preparation, and balché is used to this day for several ancestral and new ceremonies. The aim of this paper is to offer the results of archaeometric experiments performed with honeys of different Yucatecan origins as well as with balché prepared both by contemporary Maya ritual specialists and by us in the Laboratory of Chemical and Microscopic Analyses of the Autonomous University of Yucatán. Our goal is to approximate chemical and paleobotanic evidence from the honey and the balché by enriching modern pottery fragments for their subsequent residue analyses, which allow us to propose the possibility of its archaeological identification. In this way, we want to contribute to the analyses of archaeological artifacts and contexts in the discussion about honey and ritual in ancient Mayan beverages.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38566.0