Reflection #3

     Recently in class, we learned to make one of the more important things mankind has invented since slice  sliced bread, brewing of beer. On a more serious note, beer was important to ancient civilizations because it could be stored for longer periods of time without going bad in comparison to water so some cultures would frequently drink beer in place of water.  Beer also would have been used during celebrations or feasts as a treat of sorts.  Other ancient cultures allocated their source of beer based on the age of the recipient. For instance, an old man could have 6 beers while a young boy would be given only half a cup full.

                The process of actually brewing the beer involves a decent period of time and some patience. The ingredients involved are the hops, grain, yeast, and water. The first step was to boil the water and  create a grain tea type concoction that is used to extract the sugar from the wheat. After malt extract is added, the yeast is added in and we then pour all this into a large container. The idea in the fermentation process is the yeast eats the sugar and the end product is the alcohol. This is the part of the process that takes a good portion of time hence the patience aspect of brewing as of now we mixed carbon dioxide into the beer in a more modern method so we will be testing our beer this coming week in class.

                 The interesting part about the ancient civilizations discovering this fermentation process is how it could have been discovered. There would have been some water with just the right amount of sugars left out for a time then somebody had to be the one to, accidently or purposefully, try the strange new creation. It amazes me sometimes the things that we take for granted today that had to be discovered somehow thousands of years ago. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but if it led to beer I am not opposed to a little inquisitiveness.

Eddie Krukowski

 

Reflection #3

Last week’s class was thoroughly enjoyable. For one, we started to make beer.

First, we filled an empty water tank to a few gallons strong, then added some sort of soap formula into it. Then we shook it a bit and created a cleaning formula to ensure that the beer was not contaminated during the fermenting process. Then we had an empty water tank and filled it up with water soaked with hops and wheat and whatnot. Some of us tasted it, and it was sweet with a bitterness later down your throat. Beer should taste the same minus the sweetness, as the sugar should be chemically turned into alcoholic content by the end of the process. We then sealed the tank and put it into an area with ice. Now we just have to wait for a couple of weeks to see the final result. Beer is such a common commodity, but how many people that drink it regularly have ever made their own beer? I can imagine ancient humans stumbling across the fermenting process, tasting alcohol for the first time, and hailing it as the greatest invention ever. Thus also were the first drunkards created.

Then we had fun with our oil lamps we made weeks ago by putting them into its first practical test. We added oil into it, tore the nylon out of a string, and put a string through the oil lamp. The theory is that the string would suck the oil, and when it burns it would consume the oil instead of the string. With a few exceptions, that was how it turned out. In a dark room full with ancient oil lamps that illuminated millenniums of human life, the scene was oddly beautiful. We take many things for created and live in a world where everything is created to maximize convenience, but something the world has only gotten more complicated instead of being simplified.

 

 

Albert Ho

 

Reflection #2

In the last couple of weeks, some of the things we’ve learned are: blacksmithing, how to make cheese,and flint knapping, I actually enjoyed blacksmithing, with fire and sticks of iron as raw material. I actually expected the forging to take place within a small hovel or stone igloo of sorts, which is usually how t.v has depicted it fro what I’ve seen. It was interesting to know people added their own details by adding twists and/or engrave, especially the the loop at the end of something like a spoon or fork, which they would use to   tie something through it and have hang from their neck or somewhere it wouldn’t get lost. Flint knapping was probably a little more dangerous than forging because of the specks or chunks of rock that broke off as people created their tools for hunting or cutting. I actually tried to create an arrowhead but it’s so difficult to get the details just right, like the curved bottom and the narrowing tip and having the sides narrow and sharp because I didn’t know how and where to hit it to do so. It was fairly simple and easy to create tool by scraping one stone into the other if you didn’t mind creating a rugged tool, but something more defined was difficult. The more recent activity was brewing, which I didn’t think was simple, but actually it was, so long as you knew what to do. There things like hops, grain, water, malt, and keeping everything clean and untainted. Interesting fact, I did not realize that beer was all about the sugars and that the carbonation came from cooling it down and keeping it cool. The best part about it all is that most of the activities could be done at  home (with the exception of blacksmithing) and people could “gather” the materials (buying grain, milk, or go looking for two stones to flint) and make things out of scratch. Only difference between now and a couple of years ago, people don’t have to make or grow the “scratch” materials so it is a such quicker process than before.

 

-Jerardo Perez

 

Reflection #2

Over the past five weeks, we have covered a wide array of survival techniques.  Overall, I found that creating different types of foods from simple ingredients to be the most astounding.  It is amazing to think how today, we just go to the grocery store and are able to choose from thirty different cheeses while back in the olden times, it would take a huge amount of effort, skill, and labor to produced one lump of mozzarella (which would only cost us about $2 today).  It makes me wonder how they even discovered the recipe to make milk into cheese, a completely different food product.

Another amazing human survival technique that we have learned about is blacksmithing.  The amount of equipment necessary to create such simple, small tools such as spoons and forks is ridiculous!  The process is so tedious and tasking.  It makes me so thankful to be able to have at least 20 different forks available at my home without ever having to use a fire and steel to manufacture them myself.

Every single class makes me so appreciative of the people who came before me that were able to develop the technology available today to make life so much easier.  Now, human civilization doesn’t need to spend days on end creating menial tools use everyday; we have the privilege of using our time to do something more profound with our lives. If the technology was never developed to make simple tasks such as preparing food or making metal pieces more readily available, the world we live in today would still be undeveloped and primitive.

 

-Elizabeth Lee

 

reflection #2

The theme over the past four weeks was food preparation. What the four classes culminated to was a meal consisting of bread, cheese, squash and goat meat. Other than using a stovetop to expedite the cooking process, each food item was prepared without modern technology to mirror the process that civilizations before us practiced every day. We hand pulled cheese and formed it into mozzarella balls; crushed grain with heavy stones for bread; and prepared cuts of meat and squash using shards of obsidian.

The most striking aspect of the whole process was the investment of time it took to prepare a single food item. Nearly every item took at least an hour in a half. Given that it was many of our first times preparing food from scratch, we expectedly took longer than it would’ve taken older civilizations. Yet, we didn’t have to collect our ingredients for the meal. We didn’t have to raise cattle for milk and goats for meat or grow grains and squash. The meal process begins months in advance before the meal itself is actually served. The amount of calories spent to attain a meal is infinitely larger than the ones it takes for us to walk to a refrigerator or dining hall. As I was eating after class one day, it struck me that something as simple as a sandwich would be very difficult to make in the past. I gained a greater appreciation for the bread, cheese, meat and vegetables that made up my sandwich. Countless hours were put into the ingredients of a sandwich that took me minutes to prepare and eat.    

I gained an even greater appreciation for my food when I learned how easily it could disappear. A competition was set up between both groups to see who could prepare more food in the class period. Looting food from the other groups was allowed to replicate the realities of food scarcity in the past. What resulted was a frenzy amongst friends, but in a real world situation full out war would have ensued over the theft of limited food supply. We’ve become so accustomed to a modern livelihood that we often forget the difficulties that have now become taken for granted.  

-Braulio Fernandez 

 

Reflection #2

The past five weeks have been exciting in Human Survival class. I especially enjoyed creating blades suitable for cutting different materials through flint knapping, making bread, and making mozzarella cheese. Week 5, we made pottery from clay, which was a cool experience. It’s useful to be able to make containers, cooking materials, and simply beautiful art from clay and putting it through an easy heating process. It was fun painting the vase, but forming the grain tray was a bit more difficult. In Week 6, we made bread by following the provided recipe. I enjoyed the practice and experience, as it provided me with knowledge to make an affordable and easy food just like humans did for as long as they existed. Flint knapping in Week 7 was interesting. I was able to make a nice blade, and it even came in handy once. Having pieces of glass all around me was frightening, though. Making mozzarella was one of my favorite class sessions because my team was able to make a wonderful tasting ball of mozzarella in little time. I took our mozzarella home, and it was delicious! I ate it alone, and with a tostada pizza as well. I will try it again, as soon as I buy another kit with the citric acid and rennet tablets. I’m excited to see what the rest of the semester brings as we approach the second half of Human Survival: Learning from the Past. Having experts come in to share their expertise and learning techniques for survival like flint knapping, mozzarella and bread making, fire making, and pottery making has been a blast.

 Samira Haikal

 

Spinning and Dyeing with the help of Griffin Dyeworks & Fabric Arts

As should be apparent from the multitude of recent blog posts, our freshman seminar course FSEM 180 Human Survival: Learning from the Past is going strong for the second semester in a row. We’ve been lucky enough to learn from local experts in ancient fabric arts (spinning, dyeing, and weaving). We’re grateful to Theresa, Ercil, Debbie, and Bjo for these informative and interesting lessons!

Griffin Dyeworks & Fabric Arts has published a blog post about these lessons. You can check it out here:

http://www.griffindyeworks.com/2013/03/teaching-at-usc-archaeology/

Keep checking back for updates from the students. It’s been an exciting semester so far, and we haven’t even gotten to mudbricks, oil lamps, and rock art yet!