Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 2 (2004), p. 225

In 1996, the archaeological scientist Patrick MacGovern published with two other collaborators an edited volume on the Origins and ancient history of wine (see AgHR 45 226 the agricultural (1997), p.98 for a review), directed primarily towards specialists. The present book is ‘a more popular and updated précis of the conference proceedings’ (p.xv). The conference and the volume on the Origins was prompted by the identification and analysis of organic residues that were attributed to wine in the interior of a pottery vessel found in Godin Tepe, present-day Iran, and dated to 3500–3100 BC. Since then the author’s lab has carried out analyses on a range of archaeological samples ranging from the neolithic to Byzantine periods (fourth to sixth centuries BC), from sites in Mesopotamia, the near east, Egypt and Greece. More recently, he has also been involved in an ancient DNA project (that has yet to produce definite results) which aims to find out when and where the wild Eurasian grape was first domesticated. This book popularizes the results of these analyses. It does more than that, however: it attempts to combine a wide range of data beyond biomolecular information – environmental, archaeological, epigraphic and textual, linguistic, iconographic – in order to produce a grand synthesis that solves many ofthe problems to do with the origins, the spread and early history of viniculture in the eastern Mediterranean and the middle east. Moreover, as we read on the dust jacket of the book, the author believes that ‘the history of civilization is in many ways the history of wine’. Wine production and consumption, therefore, becomes here an excuse and opportunity for the author to venture intoat times fascinating discussions, and at other times questionable themes, such as ‘the search for the pro-Indo-European homeland’ (p.35).

The basic points of the book are that there may have been a single centre for the domestication of grape vine in the eastern Taurus mountains or Transcauscasia (although the author himself admits that this is a projection on the basis of very limited current DNA knowledge); that the deliberate human selection of plants to produce wine might have started in the palaeolithic; that large-scale winemaking began in neolithic times; and that the classical tradition of mixing wine with other plants, herbs and spices has a long history and prehistory, with tree resins being the most common earliest additives. The author attributes the proliferation of wine production and consumption to the development of a ‘wine culture’. Once humans discovered the mind-altering properties of the alcoholic drink, it became a desirable ‘social lubricant’ and a powerful medicinal drug, the consumption of which spread from the temperate upland areas (environmentally more suitable for vine cultivation) to other regions, and ‘trickled down’ from the upper social strata, which initially controlled its production and consumption, to the wider population. history review

There is a lot to be commended in this important book, and the general reader will acquire an impressive amount of information on the topic, although some of the descriptions of the analytical techniques will be hard to understand. Yet, the broad-ranging nature of the book is both its strength and its weakness. It succeeds in showing the potential of organic residue analysis for the investigation of wine consumption, and in demonstrating that the study of wine drinking and of viniculture may hold the key to the understanding of a range of social processes in the prehistoric and historic past. At the same time, however, the archaeological assumptions made by the book are often problematic, outdated or plainly unsubstantiated. The author, for example, assumes that bronze age Knossos was governed by ‘a line of rulers’, when there is no evidence for the existence of a single ruler in Knossos at the time, and the whole issue of its political and social organization is highly disputed. In Byzantine mosaics depicting a woman and a baby, he sees ‘a throwback to the neolithic “mother goddess”’ (p.247), a thoroughly discredited patriarchal notion. More importantly, the author assumes a linear, almost evolutionist continuity in wine consumption since early prehistoric times, whereas a more careful analysis would reveal a much more uneven and diverse pattern in terms of scale and level of participation, not to mention social meanings and effects. In this diverse pattern, the trickling down effect may not be the most adequate explanation.

The specialist reader must be even more cautious with the book and its claims. For a start, the author makes the astonishing claim that prior to chemical analyses, the study of ancient food was based on ‘ancientrecipes and cookbooks, frescoes and drawings’ (p.293), disregarding thus more than a century of careful investigations involving archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological evidence, as well as the even older study of pottery, and food-related installations. Moreover, he assumes and demonstrates an almost absolute certainty with the results of chemical analyses of organic residues, a certainty with which few specialists would concur. Organic residues are the products of biodegradation, and their analysis is subject to serious problems to do with loss and sample contamination, not to mention the difficulty of identifying certain organic signatures (bio-markers) linked to a single plant, since many chemical compounds are widely available in nature. Many specialists also recognize that the chemical detection of ancient wine is more difficult than that of other substances such as lipids and waxes, for which more research has been carried out, although further improvement of the techniques may alter this. Until then, it should be remembered that unambiguous results should probably be reserved for the rare occasions of finding sealed vessels. Finally, the automatic assumption made by the book that tree resins found in pots indicate the deliberate flavouring of wine (which has given rise to claims such as that the modern Greek retsina, dates back to the bronze age) fails to account for the widespread use of such substances as vessel sealants (cf. N.Boulton and C.Heron, ‘Chemical detection of ancient wine’ inP.Nicholson and I.Shaw (eds), Ancient Egyptian materials and technologies (2000), pp.599–603). The study of ancient wine cannot rely on any single category of evidence, and can be more profitably achieved by theintegration of all types of material, from chemistry toepigraphy and pottery analysis, taking into account the limitations and problems of each. More importantly, it cannot be divorced from context-specific historical and anthropological enquiry that relates the sensory andembodied experience of wine drinking with the social contingencies and the power dynamics in each context.