Iris Publishers- Open Access Journal of Archaeology & Anthropology | Pre-Hispanic Distillation? A Biomolecular Archaeological Investigation

Authored by Patrick E Mc Govern

 

Multiple, highly sensitive chemical techniques were used to analyze ancient pottery vessels from an excavated cemetery in Colima, west-central Mexico, dated to the Capacha phase (ca. 1500-1000 B.C). A double-chambered jar type, together with bowl and miniature cup types, are hypothesized to have been used as a pre-Hispanic distillation still. The results from the ancient vessels were compared to those from modern replica jars of the same types in which agave had been successfully distilled to a high-alcoholic beverage. Chemical biomarkers of agave in the modern replicas were absent from the ancient vessels, as were compounds of other native natural products of the region (e.g., maize, hog plum, prickly pear, etc.). Archaeological and archaeobotanical considerations, while suggestive, also provided no definitive evidence for a pre-Hispanic distillation hypothesis. Our study is placed within a broader ancient context of how this important technology for medicines, aromatics, metal purification, and alcoholic beverages, developed in east Asia and the Middle East, later to be adopted in Europe and brought to the New World. While an independent invention of a distillation apparatus in Mexico is yet to be proved, our goal is to stimulate further research and discussion, possibly leading to more compelling evidence.Joseph Needham (1980:109-110, Figure 1485b) first proposed that native Americans in the west-central highlands of Mexico as early as 1500 B.C. were not only fermenting Agave spp. to make beverages but were distilling them into “spirits.” Needham based his case on pottery jars, which were peculiarly shaped with lower and upper chambers (e.g., Figure 1A), that had been excavated from burials in Colima and its vicinity [1]. He asserted that “…if [these jars were] surmounted by a cooling bowl and provided with a little catch-cup inside, alcohol could certainly have been distilled in them.”
This was a revolutionary idea, since it would be the earliest distillation technology yet discovered in the world [2,3], some 1500 years in advance of China and the Middle East and some 3000 years before the arrival of the Spanish and Filipinos in Mexico, with their European and Asian distillation stills, in the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries A.D. But was it true?

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