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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   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @01:11AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @01:11AM (#842172)

    Joseph Scaligers father is also very interesting:

    Julius Caesar[!!!] Scaliger (/ˈskælɪdʒər/; April 23, 1484 – October 21, 1558), or Giulio Cesare della Scala, was an Italian scholar and physician, who spent a major part of his career in France. He employed the techniques and discoveries of Renaissance humanism to defend Aristotelianism against the New Learning. In spite of his arrogant and contentious disposition, his contemporary reputation was high. Jacques Auguste de Thou claimed that none of the ancients could be placed above him and that he had no equal in his own time.[1]

    In 1512 at the Battle of Ravenna, where his father and elder brother were killed, his conduct earned him Order of the Golden Spur, augmented with the collar and the eagle of gold.

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

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @01:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @01:20PM (#842296)

    It's also interesting to look at the lifespan of all these people. Not much different from today, despite all supposed medical advances in the last 400 years.