Pre-Hispanic ritual use of psychoactive plants at Chavín de Huántar, Peru

What is it about?

At the 1st millennium BCE monumental center of Chavín de Huántar, archaeologists have for decades interpreted carved stone art to mean that ritual included the use of psychoactive plants. However, neither psychoactive plant remains nor chemical traces of psychoactive compounds in likely ritual contexts have ever been identified. Recently excavated deposits sealed in an underground gallery at Chavín contained included bone tubes, artifacts associated with consumption of psychoactive plants elsewhere in the region. This paper reports microbotanical and chemical analyses of residues in those tubes that provides evidence that psychoactive plants were used in institutionalized ritual at Chavín. This is compelling evidence that psychoactive plants were part of formalized rituals controlled by particular individuals or groups, rather than exploratory vision-quests or shamanic healing practices. As such, they argue that rituals involving psychoactive plants were an important element of the long-term transition from small egalitarian societies to large stratified ones. Such rituals apparently contributed to the creation of societies where social, political, and economic inequality were thought of as normal and to be expected.

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Why is it important?

Ritual activity is commonly argued to have played an important role in the development of complex sociopolitical formations worldwide. In the Central Andes, where ritual apparently contributed to both social integration and political maneuvering, a variety of evidence argues that ritual activity often included inducement of altered mental states. In this paper we report results of independent microbotanical and chemical analyses that demonstrate use of psychoactive plants in institutionalized ritual in the first millennium BCE, demonstrating that even in their early stages, sociopolitically complex societies incorporated psychoactive plants into ritual activity. This direct identification of the contents of psychoactive paraphernalia from pre-Hispanic Peru sheds light on the nature and function of ritual at Chavín de Huántar and other early monumental centers.