Ancient Andes society used hallucinogens to strengthen social order, snuff tubes suggest

Ice-core evidence of earliest extensive copper metallurgy in the Andes 2700 years ago

The importance of metallurgy for social and economic development is indisputable. Although copper (Cu) was essential for the wealth of pre- and post-colonial societies in the Andes, the onset of extensive Cu metallurgy in South America is still debated. Comprehensive archaeological findings point to first sophisticated Cu metallurgy during the Moche culture ~200–800 AD, whereas peat-bog records from southern South America suggest earliest pollut…

Ancient Peruvian Hallucinogen Use May Have Cemented Power, Social Order

Limiting access to mind-altering substances may have provided leaders with a means to create, control a class system.

Heavy hallucinogenic rituals solidified social castes in Pre-Incan Peru

The mighty Incan empire wasn’t the first society to spread across the Andes Mountains—2,000 years earlier, there were the Chavín. Although their own name for themselves remains unknown, the Chavín of Peru clearly shared common agricultural techniques, buildings, and artwork from roughly 900 BCE to 650 BCE. They also ordered their culture along hierarchical lines that likely influenced their Incan successors. And according to recent archeological…

This ancient South American culture used ritual drugs to reinforce social hierarchy

High in the Peruvian Andes, archaeologists uncovered snuff tubes containing traces of hallucinogens.

Ancient Andes society used hallucinogens to strengthen social order, snuff tubes suggest

Two thousand years before the Inca empire dominated the Andes, a lesser-known society known as the Chavín Phenomenon shared common art, architecture, and materials throughout modern-day Peru. Through agricultural innovations, craft production, and trade, Chavín shaped a growing social order and laid the foundations for a hierarchical society among the high peaks.

Long before the Inca Empire, Andean societies developed complex political systems whose authority was not based solely on strength or wealth, but on controlled ritual experiments. A recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team of researchers from the University of Florida, Stanford, CONICET (Argentina) and several South American institutions reveals that, from the first millennium B.C.E., the use of halluci…