SoylentNews

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)

---

Original Submission

• Re:1000 AD didnt exist (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:37AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:37AM (#842162)

  The dates of ancient Egyptian artifacts primarily come from:

  Joseph Justus Scaliger (/ˈskælɪdʒər/; 5 August 1540 – 21 January 1609) was a French religious leader and scholar, known for expanding the notion of classical history from Greek and ancient Roman history to include Persian, Babylonian, Jewish and ancient Egyptian history. He spent the last sixteen years of his life in the Netherlands.
  [...]
  It was reserved for his edition of Manilius (1579), and his De emendatione temporum (1583), to revolutionize perceived ideas of ancient chronology—to show that ancient history is not confined to that of the Greeks and Romans, but also comprises that of the Persians, the Babylonians and the Egyptians, hitherto neglected, and that of the Jews, hitherto treated as a thing apart; and that the historical narratives and fragments of each of these, and their several systems of chronology, must be critically compared.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Justus_Scaliger [wikipedia.org]

  Much of his source material was the bible and what this guy found and became rich off:

  Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (11 February 1380[2] – 30 October 1459), best known simply as Poggio Bracciolini, was an Italian scholar and an early humanist. He was responsible for rediscovering and recovering a great number of classical Latin manuscripts, mostly decaying and forgotten in German, Swiss, and French monastic libraries.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poggio_Bracciolini [wikipedia.org]

  All those "decaying manuscripts" that supposedly lasted 1500 years in random European libraries have since been "lost".

  You can read that Libby 1961 paper to see he just took the historians word for it:

  The oldest samples of known age
  measured were "Hemaka" and "Zet"
  from the Ist Dynasty in Egypt. Both
  were wood found in the subterranean
  brick structures of the Ist Dynasty
  tombs of the Vizier Hemaka and of
  King Zet, both at Saqqara. Hemaka was
  contemporaneous with King Udimu,
  and both tombs were generally agreed
  to date from 4900 + 200 years before
  the present. The next oldest samples
  were cedar wood from the upper cham-
  ber of the Southern Pyramid of Sneferu
  at Dahshur. The next sample, marked
  "Sesostris," is a very interesting one. It
  is a part of the deck of the funeral
  ship which was placed in the tomb of
  Sesostris III of Egypt and is now in the
  Chicago Museum of Natural History.
  It is about 20 feet long and six feet
  wide and is quite an imposing object,
  complete with paddles. The next sample
  is "Aha-nakht." It consists of wood,
  probably cedar, from the outer sar-
  cophagus of Aha-nakht, at El Bersheh.
  It was found in the tomb, which was
  covered with earth. The coffin was pre-
  sumably excavated by the natives at the
  same time as the El Bersheh coffin ob-
  tained for the British Museum by
  E. -A. W. Budge, after 1895.
  [...etc... it is a pain to copy/paste]

  Libby, W. F. (1961). Radiocarbon Dating: The method is of increasing use to the archeologist, the geologist, the meteorologist, and the oceanographer. Science, 133(3453), 621–629. doi:10.1126/science.133.3453.621

  Parent