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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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