"The Meaning & Making of Maize Beer in the Andes." Lecture by Dr. Hayashida

In the Andes, maize beer was and continues to be both an everyday beverage and a substance essential for social and ritual exchanges. It fueled the empire of the Inkas, who brewed, served, and sacrificed maize beer in vast quantities. In this talk, archaeologist Dr. Hayashida will discuss the uses of maize beer in prehispanic times, and how observations of contemporary brewing help identify and interpret brewing in the past. In-person lecture also offered on Zoom. Co-sponsored by the UNM Latin American & Iberian Institute.

In honor of our temporary exhibit curated by Toni Gentilli, Maxwell Museum Curator of Exhibits, "Entangled Cultures: How Humans and Microbes Co-create through Fermentation.

Dr. Frances Hayashida is Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the UNM Latin American & Iberian Institute. She grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, and left when she started college. She received her BA and MA from Stanford University and her PhD from the University of Michigan, all in anthropology. She is an archaeologist and has worked primarily in Peru and Chile, as well as Zacatecas, Mexico; Zuñi, New Mexico; northern California; and southern Hungary.

The main focus of her research is the political ecology of late prehispanic societies in the Andes, and what happened to local people, their water, and landscapes when they were forcibly incorporated into the Inka Empire. For the past 20 years she has been studying these dynamics in arid environments, first on the north coast of Peru and more recently in the high-altitude Atacama Desert, where she co-directs an interdisciplinary project with colleagues from the University of Chile and the Spanish National Research Council.