Anadenanthera colubrina, a tree species common to nearly all regions of South American Matt Lavin/Flickr
Get high, make friends. Members of the Wari society, who lived in the Peruvian Andes more than 1000 years ago, may have mixed hallucinogenic seeds into their beer. Such a mind-bending drink might have offered a way for society leaders to create bonds with ordinary people.
鈥淏eing able to provide that experience would create heightened social status among Wari leaders,鈥 says at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
The Wari culture flourished in what is now Peru between around AD 550 and 1000. Biwer calls them 鈥渢he first example of an expansionary state in the Andes鈥, preceding the later Inca Empire. 鈥淭here is no written record,鈥 says Biwer, so we don鈥檛 know what they called themselves. But they left behind distinctive artefacts and structures including canals.
Advertisement
Since 2015, Biwer and his team have been excavating a Wari site called Quilcapampa. He calls it 鈥渁 waystation along a road鈥 and says it was only occupied for a generation, between about AD 800 and 850.
In the centre of the site, the team found a pit filled with about a million seeds of Schinus molle: a kind of fruit known as molle, or sometimes Peruvian pepper. The molle fruits were used to make a fermented alcoholic drink, a bit like beer, known as chicha.
A few steps away, in a garbage pit, the team found seeds from vilca trees (Anadenanthera colubrina). Vilca seeds contain hallucinogenic substances and have been widely used in Andean cultures. 鈥淚 haven鈥檛 tried vilca myself,鈥 says Biwer, but ethnographic accounts often describe it causing 鈥渁 sensation of flying鈥.
Immerse yourself in the science of the Incas:On a New 女生小视频 Discovery Tour to Peru
If you eat vilca seeds, your stomach enzymes deactivate the active compounds within them 鈥 so the seeds are more normally ground up and taken up the nose as snuff, producing a strong effect. However, chicha suppresses those stomach enzymes, so the combination of the two would allow 鈥渁 very mild and controlled hallucinogenic effect鈥, says Biwer.
As the Wari state expanded throughout the Andes, its leaders needed ways to impress local people and create bonds with them. They often did so by holding feasts, says Biwer. Providing a hallucinogenic experience would have been an added selling point 鈥 especially as vilca doesn’t grow in the Quilcapampa area and must have been imported.
Antiquity
Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution
Topics:
