Beer, ritual, and identity: Ethnoarchaeological and archaeological study in Konso, southern Ethiopia

Abstract

The drinking of African Indigenous beers is an expression of a variety of identities from age, gender, status, ethnicity, and can serve to either bond or exclude people in a community. Beer has a deep history in Africa connecting the living with their ancestors, as well as motivating people to work as a form of reciprocity or economic payment. This study analyzes the intersection of beer and pottery using both archaeological and ethnoarchaeological analyses of pottery by examining the Konso society in southern Ethiopia. Beer production and consumption is essential as it is the agency that brings together different Konso lineages and serves as a daily food, reciprocal exchange, and a ritual libation. This paper uses previous ethnoarchaeological use-alteration analysis of household pottery assemblages as a baseline to compare to archaeological pottery assemblages from two Konso leather worker sites occupied over the last century. The archaeological pottery assemblages from these two Konso sites indicates that they were producing beer to increase their economic well being and drinking beer as part of their daily food.