Ayahuasca fixings found in 1,000-year-old Andean sacred bundle

Ritual bundle contents include leather bag, carved wooden snuff tablets and snuff tube with human hair braids, pouch made of fox snouts and camelid bone spatulas. (Photos courtesy of Juan Albarracin-Jordan and José M. Capriles) Today's hipster creatives and entrepreneurs are hardly the first generation to partake of ayahuasca, according to archaeologists who have discovered traces of the powerfully hallucinogenic potion in a 1,000-year-old leather bundle buried in a cave in the Bolivian Andes. Led by UC Berkeley archaeologist Melanie Miller, a chemical analysis of a pouch made from three fox snouts sewn together tested positive for at least five plant-based psychoactive substances. They included dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and harmine, key active compounds in ayahuasca, a mind-blowing brew commonly associated with the Amazon jungle. "This is the first evidence of ancient South Americans potentially combining different medicinal plants to produce a powerful substance like ayahuasca," said Miller, a researcher with UC Berkeley's Archaeological Research Facility who uses chemistry and various technologies to study how ancient humans lived. She is lead author of the study, published today (Monday, May 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Miller's analysis of a scraping from the fox snout pouch and a plant sample found in the ritual bundle - via liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry - turned up trace amounts of bufotenine, DMT, harmine, cocaine and benzoylecgonine.