The thesis seeks to provide an insight into the past of beer and brewing with the help of some of the tools offered by archaeology. Interest in beer is growing these days, so in the theoretical part I first focused on the technical definition of beer. Then, by presenting six brewing methods, I try to give an insight into the diversity of beer production over time. With this, I try to present the possibility of analyzing the remains of different ways of beer production, as a tool for a better understanding of brewing through time and space. In the next chapter, I give a fairly general overview of traces of beer and brewing in archaeological contexts. In doing so, I focused on analyses of the microfossil remains of beer and brewing, because they are currently the most revealing for this topic. These analyses are increasingly detailed and focus on the different types of residues left behind by brewing: brewer's stone, histological changes in individual cells in grain malt, and a brief description of the methodology for identifying ancient brewing through starch analysis. The following is a brief overview of a few selected archaeological sites around the world that are associated with ancient brewing (Raqefet Cave in Israel, Qiaotou in China, and Hierakonpolis in Egypt).
I then gave a theoretical discussion on the role of beer over time, supported by examples of ethnographic analogies and research on current pre-industrial brewing around the world, as well as a few sentences on the "traditional view" on fermentation. At the end of my thesis, I described the archaeology of experiments – my own experiments with pre-industrial brewing on the example of the Carinthian stone beer. This pre-industrial beer, which was preserved in Carinthia at least until the middle of the 20th century, was an important part of my research into the past of brewing. Through the making of it, I learned more about what it means to be part of a communal, you could even say a ritual brewing and drinking process.
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