Incan Gold And Chicha Beer – Meaningful Materials (80)

So Incan gold, these wonderful golden objects on this small platform here. Get a good close look at them. Beautiful drinking cups and beakers and then the bird ornament. So I'm particularly struck by the wonderful shape, very almost like a Constantine Brancusi golden bird. This wonderful beaker shape here has this fresh, modern appearance about it. This stylized, anthropomorphic face. So this is from, sorry? Old, so from the Incan Empire of the Andean region in South America, late 1400s, early 1500s. So in the 1530s, the Incan Empire was conquered by the Spanish and these works come from the tail end of the Incan Empire. So we might hear of the majesty of Incan gold, this famous, charged, powerful material. Gold was certainly, was reserved very much for the nobility, for the royalty of the Incan Empire, the emperor and the emperor's line. Definitely associations with nobility, symbolic of the sun god of the Inca and the emperor and the emperor's line is thought to descend, be descendants from the sun god Inti. So the association of gold with the rays and the light of the sun, hence gold was reserved only for the royal family. These wonderful cups and the beaker, which also is either a drinking vessel or perhaps a pouring vessel, but so these were actually utilized. Utilized gold, interestingly, never as a form of currency in the Incan Empire, though while always highly prized and as a limited resource and a prestige item, never as a raw form of currency as it's been in other places all around the world, but certainly always used in a ceremonial and ritual context for communal feasting and drinking, so these cups served as communal drinking vessels and also for pouring offerings, libation offering, that's the fancy word for a type of offering that's poured in honor of one's ancestors or the spiritual, supernatural world or natural, powerful forces. And what do you suppose they might drink out of these vessels? So wine, did they drink wine? I don't know, I mean, to what extent were grapes cultivated in the Andean region? Well, so we do find in South American context, there's, yeah, the popular use of cocoa and chocolate, but actually I heard it over here, beer, more likely beer, but a very different type of a beer, beer and wine, and these are terms that we use today to describe very specific types of beverages, but culturally speaking, historically speaking around the world, beer and wine is tossed around a little more loosely among academics, basically beer is any type of a fermented drink produced from a grain, whereas, yeah, so, and we didn't, barley typically is the type of beer that one finds in many regions of the world, barley, wheat, but here in the New World, we're talking about corn, yeah, so corn or maize more properly, corn is also another term that can be misleading because among anthropologists and archeologists, the term corn is often used for whatever the staple grain crop is, whether it's barley, wheat, or rice, corn, the word corn is sometimes used, but maize specifically is what we think of when we think of corn. So it's a corn beer called chicha, yeah, which is certainly still something that's produced in the Andean region today. Has anybody ever enjoyed chicha? Have you now? Oh, great, where was that? In Peru, no kidding, oh, fantastic, what did it taste like? It's not to your liking, okay, well, definitely, I mean, beer aficionados turn their nose up to the idea of corn in beer, corn is often included in cheaper mass-produced beer as an adjunct to boost the alcohol and intentionally to reduce the flavor, so it appeals to the more common masses, but it definitely can produce a pretty dry type of alcoholic beverage that often is very milky in its appearance and has a bit of maybe a gritty graininess to it, but you do have some brewers today who are trying to recreate some of these ancient traditional beverages, and so I enjoyed chicha in Boulder last time I was there a few weeks ago, so, yeah. So the gold certainly is the material that is meaningful to the Inca, I love these two little cups here towards the back which have interesting decorative design of birds frolicking in cornfields, stylized representation of corn, you can see where I'm looking at the beaker, sorry, the cup a little closer has a nice long stalk coming up with big ears and then the fronds at the top of the stalk, so you might see that on your side as well. This wonderful large aribolos is the term that our historians use, which is actually specific to ancient Greek ceramics, it's an ancient Greek word, but it has this vague shape of the Greek aribolos, so that's what's used to also describe this form. This is a large transportation, could also be for fermentation, but a large transportation vessel for chicha corn. Probably quite a feat to carry this thing around, yeah, you have the great big lug handles on the side, a couple also tiny little hoops right at the lip, and you have this interesting projecting knob right on the shoulders, you could say, a shoulder or towards the neck of the vessel, this big projecting knob, had a very distinct specific function that is so hard to guess what that function might be, but we don't have to guess, we actually have a demonstration right here, and this lovely little ceramic figurine of a woman carrying one of these large aribolos vessels on her back, you see the big rope is strung through the large handles, that knob on the shoulder is simply used to keep that rope in place from sliding off, so this is how chicha is transported. Yeah, so the narrow point, that's all part of it too, that's not a stand, the narrow point, you see she has the narrow point there as well, so you find that similar design in a lot of also ancient Mediterranean ceramics from Greece and Egypt for a vessel that you would, on soft earth or sand, you can simply insert it into that soft earth, so that's more effective than a round bottom, so it has that point that projects into the earth, and then it becomes stationary and stable, but you also have some flat-bottomed vessels as well, these large glazed painted ceramic vessels, which also served perhaps as fermentation vessels for chicha. Last quick interesting fun note, so here the woman carrying the chicha, the aribolos full of chicha, conceivably and not entirely unlikely, might be the one who brewed the chicha as well, commonly as in so many cultures all around the world, the original brewers were women, and then only once it becomes a lucrative career that makes money, then the men take it away from the women, but certainly the earliest brewers around the world were women, and to this day still in the Andean region.