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Some archaeologists say in the distant past New Mexico was a dry watering hole, a dark place where no beer, no fermentation existed.

Glenna Dean, the state archaeologist, isn't one of them.

If New Mexico's Pueblo Indians didn't have beer 800 to 1,000 years ago, then people in the area would be missing something common to other American Indians who lived in surrounding areas like Arizona and Mexico, she said.

"I was puzzled by this certainty by archaeologists that people from Spain had brought the first fermentation to New Mexico," Dean said. "Given that just about any liquid that you can think of will ferment by itself if you lay it out for a while — it's amazing to think this wouldn't happen here."

But even though the idea seems obvious, Dean still needs to prove it.

So she forced together an odd mix of the distant past and the most advanced areas of modern technology and hit up Sandia National Laboratories for some help.

Sandia has a technology that can see what sort of organic materials — like the products of fermentation — are present on a surface.

The technology heats the surface, turns the substances into a gas and then reads the unique signature of the materials in that gas, said Ted Borek, a researcher.

"Those kinds of tests are vital to Sandia's mission, although that's about all I can say about it," Borek said.

When Dean approached Borek, the big question was, could the technology see that sort of evidence on ancient pots that were shattered and buried hundreds of years ago?

"I didn't think it would work," Borek said bluntly.

But it did.

And so far, the evidence looks promising, both said.

To test the idea, Dean looked to her favorite home brewer — her husband — to help figure out how Pueblo Indians might have made fermented beverages.

Their grain of choice would have been corn, which was the most common food at the time, so the substance most likely was some sort of corn beer, Dean said.

The Tarahumara Indians in Mexico still make a type of corn beer that would likely be similar, so Dean made several varieties of their recipe — some using wild yeast in the air and some using her husband's brewer's yeast — and put the concoctions into clay pots like the Pueblo Indians used.

As part of the experiment, she also got to try a bunch of her invented corn beers, she added.

"Most didn't taste particularly good," she said with a laugh. "Although the last one I made with beer yeast, it smelled and tasted like weak beer. It wasn't bad at all."

After removing her various concoctions, she brought the pots to Borek's lab so he could test them and compare them with samples of potsherds dug from ancient Pueblo Indian sites.

"We got a whole bunch of data back from all those pots, but basically they all gave the same results — all the ancient and modern ones showed evidence of fermentation," Dean said.

She also tested a different substance where the corn mixture was cooked first and then left out. That one did not show evidence of fermentation — indicating that the material in the ancient pots was purposely fermented, she said.

The Pueblo Indians might not have used the fermented substance as a drug, like beer or wine. They might have used it as a food source, she said.

"When you sprout corn, like you do in the brewing process, it increases its nutrition," Dean said. "And when you ferment it, it increases the nutrition even more. So it might not have been used as a beverage."

Cheese, yogurt, miso and pickles are all also fermented, and aren't used as intoxicating substances, she added.

For Borek, the experiment has been a true learning experience about the history of beer, he said.

"When we saw evidence on these 1,000-year-old pots it was cool — it was one of those live-for-science type moments," Borek said. "It was very interesting that the technology worked on something that old."

The work was paid for by a $10,000 New Mexico Small Business Assistance Program grant from Sandia to Dean's company, Archaeobotanical Services Inc. Her company analyzes archaeological information about ancient plants, although this project wasn't done for a paying customer — it was done because she was curious, Dean said.

And the work isn't finished. Dean and Borek plan to run tests on several more pots during the rest of December, and then Dean plans to analyze the data and hopefully publish a paper by next summer, she said.

"We just wanted to find out if we could do this — and we could," Dean said. "It's fascinating."