--

At Göbekli Tepe they’ve found stone basins that held some kind of communally-consumed liquid and shattered remnants of drinking vessels, but as yet no direct chemical traces of brewing; nearby sites have yielded images of humans dancing with animals, with strongly suggest intoxication. Here is my footnote from Ch 3 on this:

To be fair, there is, as yet, no direct evidence, in the form of chemical residues, etc., that the vats and vessels at the site were used for alcoholic beverages. In their latest statement on the topic, Dietrich and Dietrich characterize the evidence for the use of “mind-altering beverages” at the site as “tentative” (Dietrich and Dietrich 2020: 105).

--

--

Edward Slingerland
Edward Slingerland

Written by Edward Slingerland

Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at UBC, author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization (June 2021)

Responses (1)