Fermented beverage and food storage in 13,000 y-old stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, Israel: Investigating Natufian ritual feasting

Fermented and alcoholic beverages played a pivotal role in feastings and social events in past agricultural and urban societies across the globe, but the origins of the sophisticated relevant technologies remain elusive. It has long been speculated that the thirst for beer may have been the stimulus behind cereal domestication, which led to a major social-technological change in human history; but this hypothesis has been highly controversial. We report here of the earliest archaeological evidence for cereal-based beer brewing by a semi-sedentary, foraging people. The current project incorporates experimental study, contextual examination, and use-wear and residue analyses of three stone mortars from a Natufian burial site at Raqefet Cave, Israel (13,700–11,700 cal. BP). The results of the analyses indicate that the Natufians exploited at least seven plant taxa, including wheat or barley, oat, legumes and bast fibers (including flax). They packed plant-foods, including malted wheat/barley, in fiber-made containers and stored them in boulder mortars. They used bedrock mortars for pounding and cooking plant-foods, including brewing wheat/barley-based beer likely served in ritual feasts ca. 13,000 years ago. These innovations predated the appearance of domesticated cereals by several millennia in the Near East

Volta ao mundo por ouvir-dizer: redes de informação e a cultura geográfica do Renascimento

This paper shows what an important role Renaissance culture played in shaping the mindset of modern travelers thanks to its focus on observation, curiosity and the pursuit of intellectual refinement. Another peculiarity of this historical period is the use of geographic knowledge for strategic purposes. However, the official secrets, homologated by the Casas de Contratación (entities set up by Spain to control colonial trade), went through a continuous process of corrosion. The need of the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns to ratify their possession of new colonial territories made the disclosure of such information as important as silence. Furthermore, the experience of the Discoveries was assimilated by second¿hand informers and shared through diplomatic and commercial channels that branched out across Europe. This collective and non¿official organism - or "network" as we might call it today - made data relative to Asia, Africa and America available to cosmographers, thus constituting a firm basis for 16th¿century cartography. The paper is an effort to show that the flow of geographic knowledge during the Age of Discoveries was characterized by a virtually unrestricted practice of copying and by a circuit of consumption that was both informal and international