ANCIENT BEER JUGS DISCOVERED IN THE AMAZON

From Egypt to England, beer has long been known to have been integral to ancient civilizations. Now archaeologists have discovered 2,500-year-old beer jugs in an extensive ancient city in the Amazon rainforest, which has been lying completely hidden for thousands of years. Located in eastern Ecuador, the city was situate near a volcano, where the rich soils provided perfect growing conditions for crops but might also have been the destructive power that caused the society’s demise. It is believed the city, which has an impressive collection of roads and canals, was built around 2,500 years ago and that people lived there for around a thousand years. As a result of the large-scale community and crop-growing potential, it is believed that jugs discovered were used to consume “chicha”, a type of sweet beer. The beer, which has a full name of Chicha de jora, is a corn beer that is prepared by germinating maize, extracting the malt sugars and boiling the wort, like a traditional barley beer, and then fermenting it in large vessels. These were traditionally large pieces of earthenware and would be fermented for several days before consumption. The research, published in the journal SCIENCE discovered that a “dense system of pre-Hispanic urban centers has been found” in the Upano Valley of Amazonian Ecuador within the foothills of the Andes.