A set of late Neolithic ceramic vessels pulled from two archaeological sites in Poland has yielded the oldest direct chemical evidence of brewing in the country’s northeast. Researchers at the University of Warsaw and the Lodz University of Technology reported in a peer-reviewed study published in Archaeometry that 9 of 13 pottery fragments, dating to roughly 2500 B.C., contained organic residues consistent with fermented beverages. The findings, which became available in early 2025 and drew wider attention by June 2026, place intentional alcohol production at the far eastern edge of the Bell Beaker cultural world and suggest that brewing was not a rare experiment but a routine practice at these sites.
What the chemistry revealed
Analytical chemists Joanna Kaluzna-Czaplinska and Angelina Rosiak, both affiliated with the Lodz University of Technology, led the laboratory work. Using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), a technique that separates and identifies organic compounds trapped in clay over thousands of years, the team screened 13 vessels from two sites: Suprasl, near Bialystok in the Podlasie region, and Skrzeszew, farther southwest in central-eastern Poland.
Nine vessels tested positive for biomarkers associated with fermentation. GC-MS can distinguish among several categories of ancient drink. Tartaric acid points toward grape-based fermentation, beeswax compounds suggest mead, and certain lipids derived from cereals indicate beer-like brews. The Archaeometry paper identifies the detected compounds, but the publicly available summary does not specify a single dominant beverage type, leaving open the possibility that the vessels held different kinds of fermented drinks.
The ratio itself is significant. When 9 out of 13 tested sherds return positive results, contamination or false positives become an unlikely explanation for the overall pattern. The team has prior published work indexed in PubMed on analytical chemistry methods applicable to residue studies, though the specific relevance of that entry to archaeological pottery analysis has not been independently confirmed here. GC-MS is a standard tool in residue analysis worldwide, used in landmark studies on ancient brewing from sites in Scotland, Spain, and the Czech Republic.
The sites and their context
Suprasl sits in a landscape of river valleys and dense forest near Poland’s border with Belarus. The University of Warsaw’s Faculty of Archaeology, under project leader Dariusz Manasterski, has documented it as a ritual site in collaboration with the Podlaskie Museum in Bialystok. What makes Suprasl unusual is its mix of cultural signatures. A separate study published in the European Journal of Archaeology described a ritual feature there that blends Bell Beaker elements with local late Neolithic hunter-gatherer material culture.
The Bell Beaker phenomenon, which spread across much of western and central Europe between roughly 2800 and 2000 B.C., is already closely associated with distinctive drinking vessels and communal alcohol consumption. Finding fermented residues inside pottery at a site where Bell Beaker ritual objects appear alongside hunter-gatherer traditions strengthens the case that brewing was part of a shared ceremonial practice, not an isolated local invention.
Skrzeszew, the second site, lies farther from the Bell Beaker heartland but still within the cultural corridor connecting the North European Plain to the forests of the eastern Baltic. Together, the two locations bracket a stretch of territory that scholars have long considered the periphery of the Bell Beaker world. The residue data now suggest that “periphery” may understate how actively these communities participated in wider European networks.
What remains uncertain
Several important questions stay open. The dating of the vessels to approximately 2500 B.C. rests on the broader chronology of the sites’ Neolithic occupation layers, but the published sources examined here do not report independent radiocarbon dates for the specific sherds tested. Whether all 13 vessels belong to the same narrow time window or span several centuries of use at the sites is not yet clear from publicly available material.
The social meaning of the brewing is also unresolved. Alcohol can serve many roles: a prestige good exchanged at inter-group feasts, a ritual offering, or a marker of status within a single community. Without associated evidence such as feasting debris, human remains showing signs of ritual treatment, or settlement pattern data, any narrative about why these people brewed remains provisional. The chemical data tell us what was in the pots, not what the drinking meant.
Likewise, the relationship between the Suprasl community and the broader Bell Beaker network is open to interpretation. Were the brewers migrants who carried the practice eastward? Local hunter-gatherers who adopted it through trade contact? Some hybrid of both? Isotopic sourcing of the clay or grain residues could help distinguish local production from imported goods, but no such analysis has been reported so far.
Why 4,500-year-old beer matters now
The discovery carries weight on several fronts. Most immediately, it pushes the documented history of alcohol production in northeastern Poland back by centuries, aligning it chronologically with better-known brewing traditions along the Rhine, in the British Isles, and on the Iberian Peninsula. Older narratives that framed Poland’s forested northeast as a cultural backwater, slow to adopt new technologies, now need revision.
The findings also highlight how frontier zones operated in prehistory. Suprasl’s blend of Bell Beaker and hunter-gatherer material culture shows that communities at the edge of a spreading cultural phenomenon were not passive recipients. They reworked incoming ideas and combined them with local traditions. Shared drinking, with its power to mark special occasions and forge alliances, is a plausible medium for exactly that kind of cultural negotiation.
More broadly, the study illustrates how analytical chemistry is transforming archaeology. A generation ago, scholars inferred drinking practices mainly from vessel shapes or iconography. GC-MS and related techniques now let researchers detect microscopic traces of ancient contents, turning otherwise unremarkable pottery fragments into direct witnesses of past behavior. As more museum collections and excavation archives are tested, additional pockets of early brewing will almost certainly surface across Europe’s archaeological record.
What expanded residue testing could reveal at Suprasl and Skrzeszew
Expanding residue analysis to a larger sample of vessels from Suprasl and Skrzeszew could clarify whether brewing was confined to particular pottery shapes or sizes, which would hint at specialized functions. Comparative studies with Bell Beaker sites farther west might reveal whether recipes or ingredients varied along the cultural frontier. Integrating botanical and isotopic evidence could eventually show whether the honey, grain, or fruit used in these brews was locally harvested or acquired through exchange networks.
For now, the picture is clear enough to support a careful conclusion. Around 4,500 years ago, people living in what is now northeastern Poland were not only participating in the broad Bell Beaker horizon but actively brewing and consuming fermented drinks in ways that left detectable chemical fingerprints. The combination of residue science and carefully documented ritual contexts ties their activity to a larger story of how alcohol, ceremony, and cultural contact intertwined at the prehistoric margins of Europe.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
