Humans who lived 1,000 years ago could never have imagined the incredible advancements that the following centuries would bring. What we now consider to be our mundane daily routines would be absolutely astonishing to our distant ancestors, but as a new discovery made in South America has made clear, the humans who roamed the continent 1,000 years ago already had some of the vices that continue to exist today. today.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ), reveals the discovery of what archaeologists call a “ritual package” that contained a number of psychotropic substances, including cocaine and possibly magic mushrooms.
In addition to the bag, sewn with three fox snouts, the leather bag contained two wooden tablets for grinding psychotropic plants, two bone spatulas, a woven headband and a tube with two attached human hair braids, for smoking hallucinogenic plants.
“We already knew that psychotropics were important in the spiritual and religious activities of the societies of the southern and central Andes, but we did not know that these people were using so many different compounds and possibly combining them, ” said anthropologist José Capriles, co-author of the work. . “This is the largest number of psychoactive substances that have been found in a single archaeological site in South America.”
What information can you give us?
Throughout history, humans around the world have used plant substances to alter perception, often in religious or ritual contexts. Discerning what these plants were, and how they were used, can tell us a lot about what ancient humans knew about plants, and which plants were culturally important.
So this group of archaeologists were not looking specifically for psychotropics, but for evidence of human habitation in the dry stone shelters of the Sora river valley in Bolivia. There, in a cave called the Cueva del Chileno, they found the leather bag. Radiocarbon dating of the leather casing put its age at around 1,000 years.
Using a scalpel, the team scraped off some of the material covering the inside of the fox bag and analyzed it using liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectrometry, techniques to identify minute amounts of substances.
The findings indicate that the bag could have contained four or five different plants, but definitely at least three.
“Chemical traces of bufotenin, dimethyltryptamine, harmine and cocaine, including their breakdown product benzoylecgonine, were identified, suggesting that at least three plants containing these compounds were part of the shamanic paraphernalia,” the researchers wrote.
“This is also a documented case of a ritual pack containing both harmine and dimethyltryptamine, the two main ingredients in ayahuasca (a psychedelic herbal tea).”
It is not known how widespread the use of ayahuasca was, or how long it has been used, perhaps millennia, or just centuries, so this adds a significant data point.
Of course, it is impossible to calculate from this sample how the plants were prepared, but it does show that the inhabitants of the Sora River Valley knew the properties of the plants 1,000 years ago.
In fact, the owner of this bag was probably a shaman . These spiritual leaders were the ones who knew how to use plants to reach an altered state of perception in order to communicate with the spiritual world.
The kit also demonstrates that, in addition to an impressive knowledge of plants and their properties, these individuals made significant efforts to obtain psychotropics, illustrating the importance of that connection to the “spirit world.”
“None of the psychoactive compounds that we found come from plants that grow in this area of the Andes, which indicates the presence of elaborate exchange networks or the movement of this subject in various environments to obtain these special plants”, clarifies the archaeologist Melanie Miller of the University of Otago.
Referencia: Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America. Melanie J. Miller, Juan Albarracin-Jordan, Christine Moore, and José M. Capriles PNAS first published May 6, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1902174116
