Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany / Bacchus und die bürgerliche Ordnung. Die Kultur des Trinkens im frühneuzeitlichen Augsburg

Lining the streets inside the city's gates, clustered in its center, and thinly scattered among its back quarters were Augsburg's taverns and drinking rooms. These institutions ranged from the poorly lit rooms of backstreet wine sellers to the elaborate marble halls frequented by society's most privileged members. Urban drinking rooms provided more than food, drink, and lodging for their guests. They also conferred upon their visitors a sense of social identity commensurate with their status. Like all German cities, Augsburg during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a history shaped by the political events attending the Reformation, the post-Reformation, and the Thirty Years' War; its social and political character was also reflected and supported by its public and private drinking rooms. In Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany, Ann Tlusty examines the social and cultural functions served by drinking and tavern life in Germany between 1500 and 1700, and challenges existing theories about urban identity, sociability, and power. Through her reconstruction of the social history of Augsburg, from beggars to council members, Tlusty also sheds light on such diverse topics as social ritual, gender and household relations, medical practice, and the concerns of civic leaders with public health and poverty. Drunkenness, dueling, and other forms of tavern comportment that may appear "disorderly" to us today turn out to be the inevitable, even desirable result of a society functioning according to its own rules.

Mechanical Properties of Plant Underground Storage Organs and Implications for Dietary Models of Early Hominins

The diet of early human ancestors has received renewed theoretical interest since the discovery of elevated d13C values in the enamel of Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus. As a result, the hominin diet is hypothesized to have included C4 grass or the tissues of animals which themselves consumed C4 grass. On mechanical grounds, such a diet is incompatible with the dental morphology and dental microwear of early hominins. Most inferences, particularly for Paranthropus, favor a diet of hard or mechanically resistant foods. This discrepancy has invigorated the longstanding hypothesis that hominins consumed plant underground storage organs (USOs). Plant USOs are attractive candidate foods because many bulbous grasses and cormous sedges use C4 photosynthesis. Yet mechanical data for USOs—or any putative hominin food—are scarcely known. To fill this empirical void we measured the mechanical properties of USOs from 98 plant species from across sub-Saharan Africa. We found that rhizomes were the most resistant to deformation and fracture, followed by tubers, corms, and bulbs. An important result of this study is that corms exhibited low toughness values (mean = 265.0 J m-2) and relatively high Young’s modulus values (mean = 4.9 MPa). This combination of properties fits many descriptions of the hominin diet as consisting of hard-brittle objects. When compared to corms, bulbs are tougher (mean = 325.0 J m-2) and less stiff (mean = 2.5 MPa). Again, this combination of traits resembles dietary inferences, especially for Australopithecus, which is predicted to have consumed soft-tough foods. Lastly, we observed the roasting behavior of Hadza hunter-gatherers and measured the effects of roasting on the toughness on undomesticated tubers. Our results support assumptions that roasting lessens the work of mastication, and, by inference, the cost of digestion. Together these findings provide the first mechanical basis for discussing the adaptive advantages of roasting tubers and the plausibility of USOs in the diet of early hominins.