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Traces of Five Psychoactive Drugs Found in Thousand-Year-Old South American Ritual Kit

posted by martyb on Friday May 10 2019, @08:13PM   
from the why-booze-when-you-can-bong? dept.

takyon writes:

Traces of five drugs found on 1000-year-old South American ritual kit

A 1000-year-old collection of drug paraphernalia found in a rock shelter in Bolivia features traces of five psychoactive chemicals, including cocaine and components of ayahuasca. This is the largest number of psychoactive compounds detected in a single archaeological find in South America, the researchers say. The plants they come from aren't native to the highland area where they were found, so they may have been brought there by trading networks or travelling shamans.

[...] Radiocarbon dating puts the date of the bag at AD 905 to 1170, roughly coinciding with the collapse of the Tiwanaku state, a once-powerful Andean civilisation that endured for around five centuries. Drugs are thought to have played an important role in Tiwanaku culture, possibly in healing ceremonies and religious rituals believed to enable contact with the dead.

Melanie Miller at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and her colleagues used mass spectrometry to analyse samples from the pouch and plant stems. They detected five psychoactive compounds: cocaine, benzoylecgonine (BZE), bufotenine, harmine and dimethyltryptamine (DMT).

Also at Berkeley News, Science Magazine, National Geographic, and ScienceAlert.

Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1902174116) (DX)

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Original Submission

• Re:The woods are great Re:The woods are great (Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Friday May 10 2019, @09:19PM (1 child)

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday May 10 2019, @09:19PM (#842064) Journal

  It's interesting that we can detect 5 psychoactive compounds after so long. And the combo is important.

  “This is the first evidence of ancient South Americans potentially combining different medicinal plants to produce a powerful substance like ayahuasca,” said Miller, a researcher with UC Berkeley’s Archaeological Research Facility who uses chemistry and various technologies to study how ancient humans lived.

  “Whoever had this bag of amazing goodies … would have had to travel great distances to acquire those plants,” says Melanie Miller, lead author of a new study on the discovery and a bioarchaeologist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. “[Either that], or they had really extensive exchange networks.”

  Nearly every culture on Earth has dabbled with consciousness- and perception-altering substances. Indigenous groups from Central and South America have used hallucinogens such as peyote and psilocybin mushrooms during rituals and religious ceremonies for thousands of years. Archaeologists have uncovered hundreds of items that provide a glimpse into these ancient practices, but few are as complete as the Bolivian find.

  [...] Shamans “say they’ve had [ayahuasca] for a very long time. So in some ways, I wasn’t surprised,” she says. But because archaeological evidence has been lacking, the new find is “exciting.”

  Though ayahuasca is touted today as an “ancient” preparation, the actual age of the brew and ritual are contested. Capriles’s find can be considered the world’s earliest archaeological evidence of ayahuasca consumption, although there’s no way to prove that the shaman at Cueva del Chileno actually brewed or administered ayahuasca from the ingredients detected in the pouch.

  Modern ayahuasca preparations “are idiosyncratic,” says Dennis McKenna, an ethnopharmacologist who specializes in plant hallucinogens and leads modern-day ayahuasca retreats. “Every shaman practically has his own brew.” But he agrees that the substances found in the Cueva del Chileno shaman’s pouch could have been used to prepare ayahuasca.

  “People have been arguing that [ayahuasca] was mostly a recent thing,” says Scott Fitzpatrick, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon who was not involved with the research. “The ayahuasca ritual has a deep time perspective now.”

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• Re:The woods are great (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @10:49PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @10:49PM (#842109)

  > although there’s no way to prove that the shaman at Cueva del Chileno actually brewed or administered ayahuasca from the ingredients detected in the pouch.
  Maybe not prove, but I'm not aware of anything containing high enough DMT concentrations to smoke, and the oral route requires an MAOI to actually work, which yields ayahuasca. So it's at least highly suggestive, unless someone knows any other viable way they'd have used it at all.

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