"If the ancient mountaintop city in southern Peru was the vanished Wari empire’s unique imperial showplace, the brewery was its piece de resistance.
"This one of the shawl pins found on the floor of a 1,000-year-old brewery built by the Wari empire high in the Andes mountains of Peru. The finding suggests the brewers who made the brew -- based on a pepper tree berry and known today as chicha -- were wealthy women of the highest social class.
"Outfitted with fire pits and large stones that supported huge ceramic vats, it had the capacity to churn out weekly batches of hundreds of gallons of brew – a highly impractical alcoholic delicacy, given the city’s perch thousands of feet above the nearest water source.
Archaeologists from the University of Florida and The Field Museum in Chicago last year announced that the 1,000-year-old industrial scale brewery, built by the largest empire to predate the Inca, appeared to be the oldest in the Andes mountains. In a paper to appear next week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they make public another noteworthy discovery: At least 10 elegant metal shawl pins on the brewery floor.
"The finding suggests the brewers who made the brew — based on a pepper tree berry and known today as chicha — were wealthy women of the highest social class. "
The discovery of the shawl pins is one of numerous new and expanded findings presented in the paper, an overview of more than a decade of research and analysis. Others include the most detailed description yet of the Wari’s ritualized destruction of key buildings in the city in the days and hours before they mysteriously abandoned it. "
See Science Daily for more on the papers presented on this site.
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