Last week I attended a lecture at the Toledo Museum of Art. The event was organized and hosted by the Toledo Society of the Archaeological Institute of America. The title of the lecture was “The Past on Tap: Archaeological Evidence for Ancient Alcohol in Iron Age Celtic Europe”, and delivered by Dr Bettina Arnold, Professor of Anthropology at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
Dr. Arnold’s lecture focused on presenting archaeologial evidence and analytical advances used in investigating feasting practices and brewing of malt and honey-based beverages during the period 1200 BC and 600 BC in Celtic Europe. The Celts were a collection of tribes who were unified by a shared culture and language. They originated in central and Western Europe, particularly central and eastern France, southern Germany and the Czech Republic. Subsequent migrations saw them extend their geographical footprint to include the British Isles, the Iberian Peninsula, and northern Italy. Despite their dispersed geography and reputation of being fierce warriors, it is worth noting that the Celts never established an empire (as the Romans did).
In her work as an archaeologist. Dr. Bettina has excavated Celtic burial mounds in southwest Germany. Among other items, Bettina discovered vessels that had been used to hold alcohol. Archaeologists use a variety of analytical techniques in their research, including organic residue analysis (ORA). ORA involves the investigation of organic residues that are trapped in, or adhered to, ancient artifacts. In seeking to understand what ancient peoples drank, the artifacts of interest are vessels that were used to store or consume alcohol. In addition to ORA, Professor Arnold also uses what she calls mortuary consumption evidence. Mortuary consumption evidence refers to the artifacts (e.g., drinking vessels) that are buried or entombed with a corpse. These often provide an indication of the status that the individual held within the society within which they lived.
The research of Professor Arnold and other scholars showed that the Celts made both beer and mead. The ancient beer would have been made with either wheat, barley, and millet. The items discovered by Bettina include a fully intact cauldron used for serving alcoholic beverages. Previous excavations by other archaeologists at a nearby site yielded nine drinking horns, one of which could hold nine pints of ancient ale. At feasts, beer and wine would have been brought to diners in flagons, where it was decanted into drinking horns, which were made of natural horn and often decorated with gold foil bands. The anthropologist Michael Dietler has called the Celts “prodigious drinkers” and “reckless inebriates”, while the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus referred to their “furious passion for drinking”. Their is no doubt that the Celts like to feast and drink, a practice that they hoped to continue in the afterlife, witness the drinking horns and a large bronze cauldron (used to hold mead) found at the grave of a Celtic chieftain’s burial site near Hochdorf in Germany. As Dr Arnold has stated, “the Celts believed in a type of BYOB afterlife. You had to bring alcohol with you and throw a big party when you got to the other side. A sign of a good leader was generosity.” The purpose of feasting and drinking was not just hedonistic pleasure. It had what one might call a political purpose, being a mechanism to strengthen ties with allies. The Celts that Professor Arnold has researched also drank wine, but this was not produced locally, being imported from the Mediterranean region.
Research by Maxime Rageot and colleagues, published in the online academic journal PLoS ONE, suggests that beer consumption may have been socially stratified with elites drinking beer made from barley or wheat, with warriors consuming beer made with millet. The reasons for these differences are not, unfortunately, reported.
In a 2018 paper in The Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies, Max Nelson suggests that Celtic brewing traditions influenced monastic brewing that became common in parts of Western Europe during the Middle Ages. Written evidence suggests that, during the 9th century, European monasteries introduced hops as an ingredient in the brewing of beer during the 9th century. Nelson, however, cites archaeological evidence which suggests that this may not be the case, and that hops were being used by Celts in northern Italy in 6th century B.C. While hops functioned as preservatives (important in the days before pasteurization or refrigeration) Nelson (p. 59) notes that “besides its preservative function, the bitterness of hops could help balance out the taste of an ancient beer, which might otherwise have been overly sweet from malt, sour from bacterial contamination, or smoky from fire-brewing”. The Greek historian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, called Celtic beer “a foul smelling liquor made from barley rotted in water”. Based on archaeological evidence found at early Iron Age settlement of Eberdingen– Hochdorf in Germany, Hans-Pete Sitka of the University of Honenheim suggests that this particular Celtic beer was“probably a dark, smoky, and slightly sour. A caramelised taste would have decreased the sourness. Floating yeast sometimes produces a light lemon taste. If flavouring agents such as mugwort and carrot seeds were added, this beverage would have had a very different taste from our typical modern beer.”
Towards the end of her lecture, Professor Arnold described attempts by a number of contemporary craft breweries to recreate ancient Celtic beer. This included Lakefront Brewery in Milwaukee, WI who worked with Arnold, to create ”a recipe inspired by evidence collected from the archaeological remains.” Based on organic residue analysis, the beer they tried to recreate, in addition to yeast, contained four ingredients – barley, honey, mint and meadowsweet. In terms of taste, the final product has been described as “smooth and pleasant — almost like a dry port, but with a minty, herbal tinge to it.” While Lakefront’s Chris Ranson described the ancient Celtic beer as “drinkable”, she doubted that there would be a sizable market for it among modern-day craft beer drinkers.
The Celtic people were not the only ancient society to brew beer. Nor were they the first. For example, around 10,000 BC, various hunter gatherer groups would periodically come together at Göbekli Tepe, a Neolithic archaeological site (home to the world’s oldest known megaliths) in eastern Turkey for the purposes of ritualistic feasting. Brewing vats and images of festivals have been discovered there by archaeologists, with the beer being made from fermented wild crops. In similar fashion, at Qiaotou in Zhejiang Province in China, archaeologists have discovered vessels containing residues of ingredients used to brew beer. The beer, according to the authors, was “likely served in rituals to commemorate the burial of the dead.” The Qiaotou site dates to around 7,000 BC.
Ancient beer may not have tasted much like the beer that we drink today. But it did serve a similar purpose in the sense that it brought people together and provided a mechanism through which people could relax and bond, much like it does today.
Further Reading:
In addition to the readings below you can learn more about the Celts by visiting the website of the Center for Celtic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Dr. Arnold is also the founding editor of the electronic journal e-Keltoi: Journal of Interdisciplinary Celtic Studies.
Dietler, Michael. 1994. Quenching Celtic thirst. Archaeology, Volume 47, Issue 3, pp. 44-48.
Nelson, Max. 2018. Celtic and Egyptian beer-production traditions and the origins of monastic brewing. Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies, Volume 7, pp. 47-77.
Rageot, Maxime, Angela Mötsch, Birgit Schorer, David Bardel, Alexandra Winkler, Federica Sacchetti, Bruno Chaume, Phillips Della Casa, Stephen Buckley, Sara Cafisdo, Janine Fries-Knoblach, Dirk Krause’s, Thomas Hope, Philipp Stockhsmmer, Cynthiaanne Spiteri. 2019. New insights into Early Celtic consumption practices: Organic analyses of local and imported pottery from Vix-Mont Lassois. PLoS ONE, Volume 14, Issue 6.
Sitka, Hans-Peter. 2011. Early Iron Age and Late Mediaeval malt finds
from Germany—attempts at reconstruction of early Celtic brewing and the taste of Celtic beer. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, Volume 3, Issue 1, pp. 41-48.
Dietrich, Oliver Dietrich, Manfred Heun, Jens Notroff, Klaus Schmidt, and Martin Zarnkow. 2012. The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities. New evidence from Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey. Antiquity, Volume 86, Issue 333, pp. 674–695.
Wang, Jiajing, Leping Jiang, and Hanlong Sun. 2021. Early evidence for beer drinking in a 9000-year-old platform mound in southern China, PLOS ONE, Volume 16, Issue 8.
