The study throws new light on exclusive rituals of hallucinogenic drugs in old Peru

An ancient society in the Peruvian Andes probably used psychoactive drugs during exclusive rituals that may have helped establish social and political hierarchies later observed throughout the region, according to a new study.

The prehistoric people of Chavín with private and potentially secret meetings where elite figures used “tobacco tubes” to consume tobacco and residues of hallucinogenic plants with DMT properties, which can be found in a wide variety of plants, said the study published Monday in the magazine procedures reviewed by pairs of the National Academies of Sciences. When ingested, DMT causes short and episodic visual hallucinations, according to the National Health Institute.

The study was conducted by a group of archaeologists and researchers led by Daniel Contreras, an anthropologist and professor at the University of Florida, who sought to investigate a Centennial Chavín complex for the evidence of drugs involved in ritual practices that were already understood as a central part of their culture. To do that, Contreras and his team explored and analyzed artifacts found in Chavín de Huántar, a UNESCO World Heritage Site In the Andean highlands about 250 miles north of Lima.

Made of stone, it is believed that the ruins that date up to 1200 a. C. The Chavín occupied that site and the region more widely to around 400 or 500 a. C. and are considered an important predecessor of the best known Inca civilization.

While previous research has indicated the ritual activity in Chavín de Huántar, and Chavín’s iconography raised questions about whether psychedelic plants were involved, the new study offered material evidence that is not seen before hallucinogens were a focal point of those meetings.

In Chavín de Huántar, archaeologists discovered a network of hidden rooms that called galleries, integrated into the largest stone complex. Within them, the team found 23 artifacts that are believed to be drug paraphernalia, mainly tubes built from the bones of the birds that, according to the researchers, functioned as inhalation devices.

The chemical tests carried out later in these tubes revealed that six of them contained traces of hallucinogenic substance dimethylectamine, or DMT, a powerful psychedelic that naturally occurs in plants and animals. In four of the six articles, the researchers said they found microoremnes related to the roots of Nicotiana’s wild species, also known as tobacco plants, as well as the seeds and leaves of Vilca’s plants similar to tobacco.

Although research on the effects of drugs in humans largely recognizes the gap in how the medical and scientific fields currently understand the reaction of the body, some reports indicate that DMT causes a temporary and intense response in the brain that can lead to those who have led him to remember anecdotally the visions and the hallucinogenic revelations.

The Contreras team held in its study that the tubes discovered in Chavín de Huántar may not have been used exclusively for psychotropic rituals. But, when those rituals took place, they said that the small size of the rooms where they were found suggests that only certain members of the Chavín society were invited to participate.

“The galleries were apparently spotlights of ritual activity, access and content of which were controlled and institutionally administered,” the study authors wrote. “According to the evidence presented here, we can now strongly infer not only that ritual in Chavín involved the consumption of psychoactive ones, but more specifically than the ritual activity that takes place in the galleries and the first ritual spaces of restricted access in Chavín, including this consumption.”

News themezone has contacted the main author of the study to comment.

In:
• Peru
• Archaeologist