People Drink to Get Drunk
Ancient people imbibed for the same reason we do
Archaeologists recently discovered an extraordinary site in present-day Israel: an enormous Byzantine wine production facility that is 1,500 years old. The sophisticated facilities, which included warehouses for aging wine and pottery kilns for firing the amphora in which it was transported, produced the prized Gaza and Ashkelon wine, which was exported throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia Minor.
This follows fast on the heels of the discovery of another important site in Israel, probably the world’s oldest brewery, discovered in a prehistoric cave and clocking in at roughly 13,000 years old. It is worth noting that this is several thousand years before the beginnings of agriculture — in other words, ancient humans in this region of the world figured out how to brew beer before they even knew how to grow crops for food. The archaeological record is more and more making it clear: our taste for intoxicants is older than civilization itself.
News accounts of these finds follow a predictable formula: a description of the site, some intriguing details that make it relatable (e.g., the beer was probably not to modern tastes, and relatively weak), and then inevitably a tagline from one of the archaeologists working on the site commenting on its significance, trying to explain why humans would invest such incredible resources and effort in producing wine or beer. The BBC article about the Byzantine winery, for example, concludes by quoting Jon Seligman, one of the excavation’s directors, who explains that wine produced at this site “was a major source of nutrition and this was a safe drink because the water was often contaminated.”
This sort of explanation is wearingly familiar: archaeologists and anthropologists trying to explain why people like to drink typically turn to either the “dirty water” or nutrition hypotheses. The first argues that, because the process of fermentation purifies the water used to make beers or relies on relatively safe fruit juice, beer and wines provided safe hydration to people whose water sources were often contaminated. The latter is based on the observation that beers and wines are significant sources of calories and micronutrients.
Upon scrutiny, neither of these stories makes much sense. As I explain in my recent book Drunk, if dirty water is a problem, just boil it. People don’t need to understand the germ theory of disease to stumble upon the trick of boiling water to purify it any more than they need to know what yeast are in order to figure out how to make beer. Boiling water is a lot easier than the multi-step, laborious process of brewing beer or fermenting wine, and doesn’t result in a low-dose neurotoxin that damages the liver, increases cancer risk and gives you a hangover.
While serving as a source of hydration or nutrition might play some role in the function of alcoholic beverages, humans have produced and consumed them primarily because they get one drunk, or at least pleasantly buzzed. As I argue in Drunk, given the enormous costs that alcohol imposes on both individuals and societies, it does need to be serving some useful functions. These functions, however, center on its psychoactive properties, not its health or nutritive properties.
Presumably most of the archaeologists who attribute ancient peoples’ taste for alcohol to a concern about contaminated water kick back at the end of a hard day in the field with a cold beer or chilled glass of white wine, despite their own access to perfectly potable water. Why the reluctance to acknowledge that ancient wine drinkers were similarly eager to catch a buzz? The root cause of this reticence on the part of archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and religious studies scholars to acknowledge the appeal and importance of alcohol’s psychoactive properties is our odd, and peculiarly modern, neo-Puritan discomfort with talking frankly about chemical intoxication and pleasure.
As the British writer Stuart Walton observes in his brilliant, wickedly funny cultural history of intoxication, Out of It, “There is a sedimentary layer of apologetics, of bashful, tittering euphemism, at the bottom of all talk about alcohol as an intoxicant that was laid down in the nineteenth century, which not even the liberal revolution of the 1960s quite managed to dislodge.” It is worth quoting at length his diatribe against the whiff of Victorian hypocrisy that seems to invariably accompany any discussion of alcohol:
A hysterical editorial in a tabloid newspaper calling for drinks companies to be made to pay the medical expenses of cirrhosis patients may simply be called the mood-music of the new repression, but how to react to this introductory comment in a monumental history of winemaking by one of its most elegant chroniclers, Hugh Johnson? “It was not the subtle bouquet of wine, or a lingering aftertaste of violets and raspberries, that first caught the attention of our ancestors. It was, I’m afraid, its effect.” Quite so, but why the deprecatory mumble? What is there to be “afraid” of in acknowledging that wine’s parentage lies in alcohol, that our ancestors were attracted to it because the first experience of inebriation was like nothing else in the phenomenal world? And what else in it attracts the oenophile of tomorrow in the first place, if not the fact that she found it a pleasant way of getting intoxicated today? Can we not say these things out loud, as if we were adults whose lives were already chock-full of sensory experience?
If we are to properly understand the motives of the creators of these impressive ancient sites, as well as the role that their products played in the cultures of the time, we need to move beyond our Victorian discomfort with considering the psychoactive properties of alcohol and other drugs. Byzantine fans of Gaza and Ashkelon wine probably appreciated the subtle bouquet and complexities of flavors imparted by the careful production and investment in aging evinced in this ancient winery site. But they also liked to get buzzed — and for the same reasons that we do.
Edward Slingerland is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and the author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.
