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A leather bag filled with ritual objects, found high in the Andes Mountains, gave rare clues to the hallucinatory visions of South American shamans about 1,000 years ago.
An artifact in the radiocarbon-dated bag, a pocket sewn on three fox snouts, contains chemical traces of five psychotropic substances obtained from at least three plants, says bioarchaeologist Melanie Miller of the University of North Carolina. Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. colleagues. Chemical residues include two main ingredients of ayahuasca, a vision-inducing preparation still used by ritual specialists in indigenous communities of South America. Scientists report online week of May 6 in the newspaper Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Cocaine residues suggest that the fox pocket also contained coca leaves.
The researchers found the ancient ritual package in a Bolivian rock shelter called Cueva del Chileno. The leather bag contained, with the fox leather pocket, two carved wooden shelves for snorting or smothering powdered substances, a carved snuff tube, a pair of llama spatulas, a woven band supposed to be a headband. and two dried plant fragments attached to yarns of wool and fiber.
The objects in the bag show the influences of an old Andean society called Tiwanaku (SN online: 24/08/15), say the researchers. As in many ancient Andean and Amazonian cultures, Tiwanaku shamans have entered altered mental and physical states to communicate with venerated ancestors and supernatural beings.
At least a millennium ago, Andean shamans probably acquired the plants necessary for the manufacture of ayahuasca, in the form of drink or powder, via distribution networks or during their own travels, announced the scientists. No human remains nor any direct evidence of the use of ayahuasca was found on the Bolivian site.
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