Scientists have discovered in Bolivia a very unusual burial, which preserved not only the remains of ancient Indian shamans, but also their ritual potions, which contained a record number of various hallucinogenic substances. Their description and possible purpose was presented in the PNAS magazine.
Many ancient peoples and modern tribes, stuck in a primitive communal system, widely used various psychoactive substances in their religious or even everyday life. For example, the Incas “pumped up” children intended for sacrifice with various tinctures based on coca leaves and other psychostimulants, and also ate them for other purposes.
The Amazonian Indian tribes often use ayahuasca drink in their religious practice, the "liana of spirits" in the Quechua language. This psychoactive blend consists of Banisteriopsis caapi tropical vine extract and the leaves of several other plants. The two main components of this mixture are the psychoactive substance dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and monoamine oxidase blockers, which help the drug molecules pass through the intestines.
Scientists, Capriles notes, have long been interested in how such traditions appeared and what role they could play in the societies of the Indians and other primitive peoples of the Earth. Their use could not always be associated exclusively with "communication with spirits" - for example, observations of the life of pygmies in Africa show that they smoke and eat hemp leaves to get rid of intestinal parasites.
American archaeologists and their colleagues from New Zealand and Bolivia have faced this issue while excavating the Cueva del Chileno cave, located in the mountains of southwestern Bolivia. In the distant past, as its discoverers suggested ten years ago, it served as a resting place for the mummies of several Indian peoples who lived in this area in different eras.
These people, as archaeologists found, periodically "cleaned" it from past burials and destroyed their traces, dumping sacred artifacts and, possibly, the remains of the deceased in a kind of garbage heaps. These heaps were later buried under a thick layer of sheep and llama droppings, which caused no one to pay attention to them.
A plate that shamans used to grind herbs.
Excavating in these dumps, Capriles and his colleagues discovered in one of them a rather heavy leather bag containing a very peculiar set of objects that could be described as the "working toolbox" of an ancient shaman.
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In this bag, scientists found a ritual headband, a human-shaped smoking pipe decorated with human hair, knives made of llama bones, stone millstones with traces of dried leaves, and a small bag sewn from three fox muzzles. Inside it was a vegetable mixture of unknown composition.
After analyzing the isotopic composition of the large bag, scientists found that it was made about a thousand years ago, when this part of Bolivia was dominated by the kingdom of Pukina, whose capital was the legendary city of Tiwanaku, the mythical homeland of the first rulers of the Inca empire.
Religious rituals and the associated psychedelic drugs, historians have long believed, served as one of the main tools for spreading the influence of this ancient empire. Therefore, the opening of the shaman's sack, Capriles notes, gave scientists the first opportunity to study the composition of their "opium for the people."
After scraping off a small part of the fox head pouch, the scientists analyzed its chemical composition using mass spectrometers and chromatographs. The results of the analysis surprised archaeologists - it contained six different psychoactive substances at once, including the components of ayahuasca, coca leaves, a hallucinogenic extract from the skin of toads of the Bufo alvarius species or a plant of the Anadenanthera genus, and, possibly, psilocin from "magic mushrooms."
All of these sources of psychedelic substances, as the researchers note, cannot be found in one point in South America, which suggests that shamans deliberately imported or collected them, using the trade routes of that time. In addition, the presence of all the components of ayahuasca suggests that this drink appeared at least a thousand years ago, and not relatively recently, as many historians believed.
“None of these plants grew in the part of the Andes where we found the bag, which suggests either the existence of complex trade networks, or that shamans could travel long distances, collecting potions to communicate with the spirits of the departed. Both indicate that the ancient Indians were well versed in plants and looked for them for medical or religious purposes,”concludes Melanie Miller, a chemist at the University of California at Berkeley (USA).
A pouch of fox muzzles, where the shamans' potions were kept.
