Beer cultures in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Practices, traditions, and trajectories [workshop organised within the framework 13th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East]

0572863 - OÚ 2024 RIV eng U - Conference, Workshop Arrangement
Zingarello, Melania - Paulette, T.
Beer cultures in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Practices, traditions, and trajectories [workshop organised within the framework 13th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East].
[Copenhagen, 24.05.2023-24.05.2023, (W-WRD 6/6)]
Institutional support: RVO:68378009
Keywords : beer cultures * Bronze Age Mesopotamia * beer consumption * beer production * drinking cultures * brewing
OECD category: Archaeology

This workshop explores the evidence for beer cultures in ancient Mesopotamia, that is, distinctive ways of making, drinking, appreciating, and understanding beer. Decades of painstaking research into the production and consumption of beer in Mesopotamia have laid a solid foundation, and the time is now ripe for a detailed consideration of variability in space and time. It has long been clear that the beer scene was neither homogeneous nor static across the millennia of Mesopotamian history, but only rarely has the archaeological and written evidence been brought to bear on this issue in a detailed and sustained fashion. This workshop aims to take a first step toward recognizing the diversity of brewing and drinking cultures in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. To this end, we ask participants to focus their attention on the people behind the artefacts and texts: on practices, customs, conventions, bodies of knowledge, routines, rules of thumb, preferences, movements, gestures, techniques, and traditions. We envision a multidisciplinary conversation that brings archaeologists, Assyriologists, and art historians together into productive dialogue, with an eye toward possibilities for collaboration. We also plan to publish the contributions as an edited volume or dedicated journal issue.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0343448