Use the contrast between chemical evidence and funerary interpretation in the Academy evidence-class exercise. No direct whiskey lineage or proven tomb drinking follows.
McGovern states that the proposed Jiahu shamanistic funeral feast was not proved by residue tests of tomb vessels: all pottery he selected for analysis came from residences. The site evidence supports a beverage interpretation for sampled household sherds, while a tomb-specific ritual remains an inference.
print p. 42
Chapter 2, The Spirits of the Ancestors
Checked against both preserved copies on 2026-10-02: the passage appears on physical PDF59 of the 391-sheet ebook and physical PDF59 / printed p. 42 of the owner-supplied first-paperback-printing copy. This supports the author's statement about sampled pottery; original laboratory reporting remains a separate verification task.
Evidence boundary
The chemical analysis was performed on residential pottery. The funerary scenario draws on burial context and much later texts; it is the author's interpretation rather than a residue result from a tomb vessel.