Lives in Ruins (10 page)

T
HE PLAN
for my first conference, the annual Archaeological Institute of America meeting, was simple: to have a drink with the keynote speaker, Patrick McGovern, “the Indiana Jones of Ancient Ales, Wines, and Extreme Beverages.”
Extreme beverages
was McGovern's term for mixed wine, beer, and/or mead. Our ancestors' desire for inebriation is a topic that I could relate to, and as I pored over the conference program on the train to Philadelphia, the site of this year's gathering, I worried that it might be the only topic I could understand. “Rock-Cut Sanctuaries in the Eastern Rhodope Mountains: The Gloukhite Kamani Cult Complex”? “Cretan Connections in Middle Bronze Age Ayia Irini, Kea”?

I made my way to the lobby of the Marriott Hotel, and studied the people thronging the halls. Who are you? I wondered. Thirty-two hundred archaeologists—voluble, bearded men in jeans and khakis with sun-damaged faces, and women in exotic earrings and kitten heels and just about any piece of clothing that you would never find in the field. They sorted themselves out, heading decisively in the direction of the Rhodope Mountains (Bulgaria, it turned out) or the Middle Bronze Age. They had heard the call of the desert or the jungle or the catacombs; or they had thrown their darts at a map. They were part of an action profession.

Archaeological curiosity can take you almost anywhere, but I wanted to ease in on more familiar turf and contemplate inebriation. The organizers of the AIA conference, in their wisdom, must have known that the lecture on the topic of our ancestors' pursuit of intoxication would be a crowd-pleaser, appealing to professionals and enthusiasts alike. They had secured the auditorium and the beautiful Chinese Rotunda of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology two miles from the conference hotel, and invited the public. Then they ran packed buses from the hotel to the museum to deliver all the archaeologists who craved edification on this subject.

The mixed crowd of amateurs and professionals, eight hundred or more, was buzzing. We settled into the seats of the musty old auditorium to consider the science of drunkenness and its persistence through history. Patrick McGovern was a slightly distracted man in his sixties, with a shock of white hair, a full white beard, and a mustache more black than white. He had directed a University of Pennsylvania excavation in Jordan for years and served as a pottery expert on several sites. Somewhere along the way, he told us, he decided to take a close look at what some of those old pots contained. He turned to the university storeroom, two floors above his laboratory, where bronze amphorae from Midas's tomb at Gordion in Turkey that had been excavated by Penn archaeologists back in the fifties were still “sitting in their original paper bags,” their interiors sticky with unanalyzed residue. “It was one of the easiest excavations I was ever on,” McGovern admitted. He collected scrapings, and, applying his background in chemistry, subjected the gunk to a series of tests (“I won't bore you with all the details,” he said kindly). In some amphorae, he discovered the residue of a feast of barbecue lamb and lentil stew. In others, he found “a mixture of grape wine, honey, and barley beer. I'd never heard of mixing these things together.” In fact, he said, “It kind of made me wince, thinking of drinking all
these things in one go, beer and wine together.” Then he thought, Maybe Midas and his people were on to something?

Stories about McGovern routinely filter into the popular press.
Smithsonian
magazine summed up his discoveries: “He has identified the world's oldest known barley beer . . . the oldest grape wine . . . and the earliest known booze of any kind, a Neolithic grog from China's Yellow River Valley brewed some 9,000 years ago. . . .” With his deep knowledge of the history and primacy of alcohol in human cultures and his enthusiasm for the technical properties of those crusty patches of alcoholic residue, McGovern is apparently welcome at bars and other watering holes around the world. He often finds himself a guest or guest speaker at various long tables where libations are both subject and refreshment. At one such gathering on the topic of microbrews, McGovern spoke about his harvest of residue from the dirty bronze vessels in Penn's storerooms, and threw out a challenge to the brewers in the crowd: come to my lab at nine the next morning if you want to try to reverse-engineer Midas's drink. He told the crowd at Penn that twenty microbrewers took him up on the challenge; the last man standing was Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, who had been experimenting on his own with a medieval plum drink. The two men joined forces to cook up Midas Touch, a mix of honey, white Muscat grape, and saffron. The award-winning brew led to other concoctions, all reverse-engineered from archaeological remains. For the brewer, it was intriguing business; for McGovern, it was experimental archaeology in action, “taking the clues from the past and seeing if we could come up with a modern day scenario of how these beverages were actually made.”

Speaking to the rapt audience at the AIA conference about the “extreme beverages” at the heart of his research, McGovern expressed just the right amount of concern about problems of addiction and overindulgence, which not only defused a loaded topic, but also reminded us of the transgressive nature of studying intoxication.
Because he was operating this evening at the intersection of scholarship and entertainment, his talk also included a screening of several YouTube videos of elephants and monkeys getting drunk. All creatures enjoy alcohol! It's not just us! Malaysian tree shrews love it, too! And the crowd lapped it up. “When you drink a fermented beverage, as you will later, some of you, it triggers a pleasure cascade,” he pointed out. Then he offered, solicitously, that he didn't want to keep us from the reception, and soon we were swarming up the stairs to the gorgeous, huge galleries with vaulted ceilings, dotted with treasures and stocked with bracing drinks.

McGovern's talk was free, but the reception cost $29. That sounded a little steep to me, particularly if you wasted your single drink ticket on a bottle of Yuengling or Bud. But here they were serving the very special microbrews that McGovern has helped Dogfish Head create since that first collaboration on Midas Touch: Chateau Jiahu, a rice/honey concoction based on nine-thousand-year-old residue McGovern found in China; the chocolatey Theobroma, based on a Honduran drink; Ta Henket, an Egyptian beer; and even the rare and hard-to-find Chicha,
^*
inspired by a South American maize drink and fermented with the help of Calagione's and McGovern's personal saliva. (No thanks.) None are cheap; occasionally I can get a four-pack of Midas Touch at a specialty market for $20. The price was partly due to the saffron, the most valuable spice in the world, that turned it golden.

I FOUND MCGOVERN
in the rotunda after his talk, sitting at a folding table, making change for a fan who had just bought a copy of his
book
Uncorking the Past
:
The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages
. Here was the triumphant keynote speaker who had just lectured, and who was also, by virtue of his position as scientific director of the museum's biomolecular laboratory, our host. It seemed undignified for him to be selling his own books. I offered to get him a beer and take over the handling of his money box, freeing him to sign autographs and talk to his fans. He looked nonplussed, but the beer offer was too tempting. After talking for an hour about our ancient thirst, he was thirsty.

The bartender was delighted to pop the top on a Midas Touch for its cocreator. McGovern and I clinked bottles and savored our first sips. To describe it as a “honey beer,” or an ale/wine combo, doesn't do the beverage justice. It is divine. I didn't want to swallow, just hold each sip in my mouth. McGovern called it a “Phrygian grog,” and I liked that. Yes, a wonderful Phrygian grog! It took me a while to figure out the reason the stuff tasted so delicious—perhaps because it had about three times as many calories as an ordinary beer. If beer is liquid bread, Midas Touch is liquid pound cake, drenched in honey. It did not inhibit me from making correct change for McGovern's admirers, and I made it my job to push copies of
Uncorking the Past
, which I had already read and found stimulating, effervescent, even intoxicating, its chemical geekery leavened with enthusiasm. After expounding on the details of some fermented banana remains in Africa, the author exulted, for example, over an “archaeological bombshell” that had rocked his world: “At one fell swoop, the date for the earliest banana in Africa was moved back three thousand years.”

For the rest of the evening, I got to observe the beer archaeologist under assault from his fans, many of them professionals I would hear make sober presentations about ancient chariot roads or rock art, who practically launched themselves across the table to share their pleasure in McGovern's work. Was he the star or was the star his subject, ancient beer and ale? It was hard to separate the two.
Some of these people had drunk with him at a seminal beer conference in Barcelona in 2004; others were local brewers, or even old colleagues, unsteady on their feet from age, not drink. One pushed her student at him, a young man doing, she said, some impressive work with the archaeology of distilled spirits. I felt like I was sitting with Elvis, as bashful and aw-shucks as Elvis himself was reported to be. As we sipped and chatted in the interludes, McGovern confided that when he runs low on one of his brews, Dogfish Head sends more. Nice perk!

I scrounged us another round, scavenging a plate of cheese and pastries from the ravaged appetizer table, and we nibbled while another archaeologist and fan stopped by to chat about hops. I edged a book close to the fan's hand. “Ah, I'd love to buy one,” the archaeologist confessed, taking the hint, “but I don't have any money on me.” “So send him a check when you get home,” I suggested, plucking one of McGovern's cards off the stack and sticking it in the pages of the book. McGovern, or as the people at Dogfish Head Brewery call him, Dr. Pat, signed the unpurchased book and tried not to look alarmed as his valuable commodity walked out the door. McGovern didn't hold the rash act against me. We shook hands and he thanked me for assistance in “his hour of need.” (Later, he sent me an e-mail, wondering if I had taken down the name of the archaeologist who had left without paying. I hadn't, but fortunately a check soon arrived for McGovern—even tipsy archaeologists, apparently, remember their debts.)

And as suddenly as that, the gallery was cleared and the archaeologists and archaeology fans had scattered. All that was left were empty bottles.

S
AME CONFERENCE
, different bar. The enthusiasts had long since gone home, so the serious business of archaeology could begin. The line of archaeologists snaked around the reception room in the Philadelphia Marriott, waiting patiently for their rations. Soon they would be celebrating colleagues who had made significant contributions to their field, but first they flocked to the back of the room.
Pop, pop
, the caps were flipped on bottle after bottle, then each archaeologist dove into the appetizer table, juggling a beer with a plate of cheese cubes and grapes.

The lovely older woman in line ahead of me joked as we watched the bartender serve an endless stream of beer: clearly, we agreed, beer is the international beverage of archaeology, cheap enough for students and shovelbums, and if you made it to awards night at the conference—free! It was her turn to order. White wine, please, she said. My sister in libation! We bonded over our glasses of sour house wine, made a dip over the dip table, and settled in beside each other for the program.

Her name was Sarah Milledge Nelson: early eighties, snow-white Wellesley pageboy. She wore sharp pants and jacket, a jaunty scarf, and Merrell Mary Janes. She had a way of gathering her hair up
and airing her neck, as if she were out in the hot sun. I might have dreamed her up.

I floated a clumsy pickup line and tried to guess where she had excavated. Style, gravitas, easy banter. . . . I imagined that she headed for Greece, or somewhere else in the Mediterranean. Wrong. She said her spot was China, particularly in the Northeast, near Mongolia, where one of the earliest life-size statues of a woman had been found. China was not a place where you'd expect to find large clay statues of women, certainly not five or six thousand years ago, but there one was, in pieces, at the evocatively named Goddess Temple in China, along with a variety of other sculptures, including many jade pendants with pig heads—“pig dragons,” as the pendants were called.

And this is what happens when you strike up a conversation with an archaeologist. Soon you are talking about bone grease . . . or pointy-headed babies . . . or pig dragons. No matter how many times I've heard about these sculptures since, or said the words
pig
and
dragon
together in my head, I still get a kick out of that combination of the homely and the exotic. Even the refined Nelson, I saw, also relished saying the phrase “pig dragon.”