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Researchers at Washington State University determined that the Nez Perce Indians grew and smoked tobacco at least 1,200 years ago, well before the arrival of merchants and settlers from the eastern United States. .
Their discovery contradicts the long-held view that indigenous peoples in this region of the Pacific Northwest smoked only kinnikinnick or bearberry before traders brought tobacco. from around 1790
Shannon Tushingham, Assistant Professor at the WSU and Director of its Museum of Anthropology, made this discovery after teaming up with David Gang, a professor at the Institute of Biological Chemistry, to analyze tubes and fragments of tubes from the museum collection.
"Generally, in archeology, we find only small pieces of artifacts, things you might not think about very much," she said. "But the information we can extract at the molecular level is phenomenal."
Indeed, write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers say that their dating of various materials reveals "the longest continuous biomolecular record of old smoking from a single region of the world".
Tushingham first became interested in the subject when, when she dug out plank houses in northern California for her thesis, she found two soapstone pipes.
"I just thought, would not it be interesting to know what people smoke? "Then I started looking at different plants and it was not just tobacco. People smoked a lot of different plants. I realized that the question of whether people had smoked tobacco in many places in North America was an open question. "
Native tobacco is rare in the cold northwestern climate. Coyote tobacco, or Nicotiana attenuata, is found mainly in sandy shores, while the natural range of N. quadrivalvus is southwestern Oregon.
Meanwhile, the most powerful commercial dried tobacco was easy to pack, or "twists". The explorers of the Hudson's Bay Company, the fur traders and the Lewis and Clark expedition found an eager audience when they crossed into the area in 1700. 1800s
"It happened so quickly and so early in the historical record that a complete understanding of smoking practices in situ before contact was obscured," write Tushingham and Gang in their article.
In the 1930s, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber oversaw an investigation of more than 200 tribes and bands west of the Rocky Mountains. In one of the following monographs, "Salt, Dogs, Tobacco," he stated that tobacco smoking of products other than tobacco was "more universal," with planting being limited to a "long irregular area" ranging from coast of Oregon in south-central California. . An accompanying map, however, shows three locations in the Columbia River basin where the tobacco could have been mixed with kinnikinnick.
In collaboration with tribal chiefs Nez Perce, Tushingham and Gang analyzed a dozen pipes and fragments from three sites on the Snake River. Gang said he could use a solvent to extract the substance from a pipe and analyze it by mass spectrometry. This left the pipes intact.
The technique extracts molecular amounts of residues on the surface and inside the pipes, Gang said. "We do not want to destroy them. We do not want to damage them. We had a 5,000 year old pipe that really worried us because it was sandstone. "
The results were inconclusive, but the pipe was good.
The researchers detected nicotine in the tubes after and well before Euro-American contact. None seemed to contain arbutin, a compound associated with kinnikinnick.
Because tobacco in the northwestern interior had to be planted, Tushingham said their discovery provided a new vision of the interactions between natives and the landscape. Indigenous peoples have often been referred to as "passive consumers of the environment". Yet they managed camas and even grew giant clams on the coast, she said.
"I think the suggestion that people grow tobacco was very reasonable," Tushingham said. "This is just another sign of the sophistication of cultures in this region and the way they manage plants and animals."
The researchers hope their findings will inform aboriginal smoking cessation programs, recognizing the profound cultural role of tobacco while tackling health issues.
"If we know that psychoactive plants have been around for a very long time, does that tell you anything about human physiology, human health?" Asked Tushingham. "Is not this important information to know about what we would do to treat people today, if we know more about the history of this powerful plant's evolution and its long history? of use by people? "
WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY
Header image – Nicotiana quadravalvus is one of the many tobacco species used by indigenous people in their religious and ceremonial practices. Researchers at Washington State University have found that smoking by Indians Nez Perce goes back a long way, with nicotine in 1200-year-old pipes, creating "the longest continuous biomolecular record of old-fashioned cigarette smoking." 39 only one region of the world. Credit: Emily Hull
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