Emily Mellen 00:06 

Welcome to Global Research Bytes. I'm Emily Mellen and I'm here with Tyler Jo Smith, a professor in the department of art and director of the interdisciplinary archaeology program. Hi Tyler Jo. 

Tyler Jo Smith 00:16 

Hi there. 

Emily Mellen 00:17 

In 2023 you received a CGII center grant for your research project, “Old Wine in New Bottles, The Art of Alcohol Across Antiquity,” which is a great title, by the way. Could you start by giving us a brief overview of the project? 

Tyler Jo Smith 00:29 

So, this project started life quite a few years ago in the form of an edited volume that was going to be entitled The Cultural History of Alcohol in Antiquity. And I had been invited by the editor of that volume to contribute a chapter on art, specifically. It was a bit of a tall order, because what he wanted from me was not just alcohol in antiquity that I specialized in, which is the ancient Greek world. He wanted all of antiquity from a very, very, let's say, long definition of that term, so going back as early as, say, 4000 to 3000 BC, and even into what we would call the medieval period, or Middle Ages into, say, the sixth and seventh centuries AD. So, I took on this project as a bit of a challenge. And I had been asked to do this because I was myself a specialist in ancient Greek art and archaeology. I am myself an archaeologist. And I thought that was that sounded exciting, but I'd also long had an interest in this topic, not only through my own research, but as a sort of comparative study across different cultures. So, he landed a good person when he asked me, because I was already interested in the Etruscan world, early Christianity and Judaism, ancient China, Ancient Egypt, and, of course, the ancient Greco-Roman world. So, the project was really designed, as I said, to go into this edited volume, which, by the way, was never published and never came off the ground. So that's just a kind of funny little side story, but I never lost my interest and fascination with the subject. I spent a number of years learning more and more about the non-Mediterranean cultures, so places like China, India, Africa and the Americas, and trying to get a grip on what their artistic, let's say, record, their visual culture, can tell us about their beliefs, their interests, their production and their consumption of ancient alcohol. 

Emily Mellen 02:38 

So, what did you find? 

Tyler Jo Smith 02:40 

Well, I found that this is a really, really big topic and that no one person can really manage it in a lifetime. That's the first thing I learned. But the other thing I learned is that there were some very interesting intersections across different cultures and times, one of my primary areas of research interest is ancient ritual and ancient religion. In fact, my most recent book is on art and religion in the ancient Greek world. And what I found is that, regardless of culture, and even to an extent, regardless of the exact moment in ancient or medieval time, that alcohol is often very closely tied to religious practices and beliefs. And I found that to be a very, very fascinating development. You can think, for example, in the early Christian world of the Eucharist, right? And the need in order to perform that ritual over time and with large numbers of people requires the production of wine. So, it's a very, very important aspect of that. We also know that the ancient Greeks, in much earlier times, say, the sixth and fifth centuries BC were great consumers, producers of course, and also consumers of wine at their drinking parties, what they called the symposion. So, there's a lot of interesting ways of overlapping those things. Now you may think, well, a drinking party, what's that got to do with religion? Right? That's not the Eucharist. Well, absolutely, that's true. But before any drinking party began in the ancient Greek world, libations, which are liquid offerings of wine, were made to the ancient Greek gods appropriate to the time and place. So, there was always a religious aspect underlying everything that the ancient Greeks and the Romans after them did. 

Emily Mellen 04:21 

That makes sense. I think Dionysus is also the god of wine, right? 

Tyler Jo Smith 04:26 

He is the god of wine in ancient Greece and maybe known as Bacchus to you in the ancient Roman world.

Emily Mellen 04:32 

That's right, yeah. Okay, so that's some of the intersections, some of the overlaps that you see geographically. What were some of the big differences you saw? 

Tyler Jo Smith 04:39 

I'd say the big differences were really to do with things like public versus private, right? Are you looking at art that is for public consumption, say, large scale sculptures that are on display in a sanctuary or at a temple? Are you looking at objects that were made for private use, that would be used in the home or for some other type of private occasion, maybe a wedding or a funeral or something like that. So, that would be one of the big differences. Another big difference was in terms of material. For example, the ancient Greeks were really accomplished with their pottery. They made beautiful figure decorated pottery, the so-called black figure and red figure pottery that we see on display in museums all over the place, right from here at the Fralin Museum to the Virginia Museum in Richmond to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. By contrast, the Chinese who of course, also had decorated pottery, ceramics. They really preferred making their alcohol vessels out of bronze. So, you have a very interesting kind of compare and contrast there that is to do with material and the choice of material within a given culture and within a different within a given time. 

Emily Mellen 05:53 

That's really interesting. I never would have thought about material as it pertains to this topic. So, speaking of contrasts and also similarities. I'd love to bring this back to our own time and talk about what you see in terms of our culture around alcohol, or the various cultures around alcohol in our own time in comparison to what you see in the art of this broad sense of antiquity. 

Tyler Jo Smith 06:18 

Well, it's a little bit like comparing the way we think about sports and spectacle or the way that we think about drama and theater. In the ancient world, especially in the ancient Mediterranean world, sports and drama were both tied to religious festivals to honor the gods. So, they were not just forms of entertainment or even just forms of accomplishment in the arts or in athletics. They had, or served, a higher purpose, you might say. And so, there are definitely these kinds of differences across the board when we think about ancient practices and we think about, you know, practices and beliefs and thoughts in our own day. Alcohol, as I've mentioned, in antiquity, across many cultures, was often related to religious practices. It was also very often related to death, and beliefs about death in the afterlife, which I think is extremely interesting in yet a different way. By contrast, when we think of alcohol today, we might think about the bar, the pub, a party. Certainly, in Western culture, it has a kind of aspect of celebration that we can't really get away from. And I should say that one of my interests in this topic kind of long term, one of them, of course, is a research interest, which I've mentioned already, related especially to my own ongoing research on ancient religion and ancient performance and how alcohol plays a part in those different aspects of the ancient kind of Greco-Roman world. But my other reason for being interested in this is a personal reason. It's a family reason. My father, who is now deceased, was a wine connoisseur and a wine importer. And so, my childhood was literally soaked in wine, not literally, but you know what I mean. So, I was really much kind of immersed in this world of wine and other kind of “high end,” if you will, alcoholic beverages, all throughout my life, and exposed to these things at a very, very young age. This is important, because when we think about somebody being a connoisseur, this is not just a hobby, this is more of a passion, right? And this is something in which a person becomes a true expert, and he was indeed a true expert. 

Emily Mellen 08:31 

Wow, that's a really interesting story. What a personal connection to have. So, you started to touch on this in terms of your future directions. Where do you see this research going? 

Tyler Jo Smith 08:42 

I think it has endless potential, which is both a curse and a blessing, as you might imagine. One thing I think I would like to do-- I started out with this kind of broad sweep, you know, write a chapter for a book in a cultural history. And that chapter, which is actually sitting right in front of me on the desk right now, I often refer back to it for lots of reasons, has actually never been published. But I think that's okay, because it was a way of bringing together huge amounts of disparate evidence from lots and lots of different places and times and cultures. But I think what's most interesting is what we've already touched on a little bit here today, which is what is the theme, or what are the themes, that transcend culture and transcend time? And I think I'm going to have to come back one more time to death. It seems to be that alcohol in relation to death, the afterlife, funerary rituals, mortuary practices-- that seems to be something we see from Egypt to the Etruscans to China to the Americas. It's very, very much a part of all of these different places, but in different ways. And I think that if we think of art in a big way, right, not art in the sort of like, “but is it art?”, right? But more like, you know, art as artifact as well, because I'm not just interested in visual aspects, visual culture. I'm also, as an archaeologist, interested in material aspects. So, I'm looking at objects and how they were handled. For example, how might a particular vessel have been used during a funerary ritual, or why was a particular vessel buried with the dead? Does it also have iconography, decoration, that tells us something about those rituals? Sometimes yes and sometimes no. But I think those are the types of subjects I would love to tease out in a more extended study, perhaps something along the lines of a short book. 

Emily Mellen 10:37 

I love that idea. Well, we look forward to hearing more about how the research goes. Thank you so much for talking with me today. 

Tyler Jo Smith 10:41 

Thank you for having me and thank you so much to the CGII for supporting this research.