Archaeology Magazine - July/August 2017 - 62

LETTER FROM PERU
(continued from page 58)
tegrande coil is likely that of a priest
or shaman who took one or more of
these narcotics in order to tap into
wisdom or see the future.

At the center of the Montegrande spiral,
archaeologists found ashes from
ritual fires and traces of an as-yet
unexcavated tomb.

Different people see different
things when they take Amazonian hallucinogens, but if there's one common
apparition, it's spirals. "At the beginning you see flashing lights and swirls
that lead into animal figures, such as
coiling snakes," says Clasby, who took
ayahuasca-which is legal in Peru-
with a shaman in the jungle port of
Iquitos. "Hallucinogens helped inform
a whole way of seeing the world, a
broad cosmology that was then applied
to the landscape with spirals." They
were creating, perhaps, an indelible
expression of their culture.
After snorting vilca seeds, the effect
of which is comparable to that of LSD
or mescaline, German anthropologist
Christian Ratsch wrote in the 1996
Yearbook for Ethnomedicine and the Study
of Consciousness, "After about five minutes I grew aware of swirling, dancing
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phosphenes in my visual field....The
rapidly shifting array of patterns transformed itself into a chaotic current
of spermatozoa. These teemed and
writhed in all directions at once, giving
the sensation that they were on a mission to fertilize the entire cosmos." As
part of his study, he references swirling stone carvings at yet another site,
Chavín de Huántar. Chavín de Huántar dominated the northern Andes in
the first millennium b.c., precisely the
time when Montegrande's spiral was
created. He writes, "A panorama of
flowing designs-the exact patterns
depicted in the nimbus surrounding
the head of the Chavín deity!" Art
historian Constantino Manuel Torres
of Florida International University
and another researcher, Jonathan Ott,
wrote in 2006 that they took vilca
snuff and, four minutes later, saw "brilliantly swirling geometric patterns."

hen the people of Montegrande were laying out their
stone spiral, in about 1000
b.c., Chavín de Huántar was a ritual
site that drew pilgrims from across the
Andean realm and exercised a deep cultural influence over the whole region.
Hallucinogenic imagery from the
jungle was a major part of its cultural
signature. Located high in the Andes,
300 miles south of Jaén, Chavín de
Huántar's sprawling network of tunnels,
towers, and intricate stone carvings of
supernatural animal-human hybrids
survives largely intact today. Richard
Burger of Yale University has studied
those stone carvings in detail and
documented how they depict the use
of mind-altering drugs. Some carvings
show a man's face gradually morphing
into a jaguar or a serpent or some phantasmagoric combination of the two,
while long strips flow from the figures'
noses. Those strips represent mucus
from glands inside the nose irritated by
vilca snorting, Burger maintains. The
bulging eyes and crazed expressions of
drug users are also carved in the stone.

Archaeologists have discovered ancient
drug paraphernalia such as snuff spoons
and mortar grinders used to mash vilca
seeds at Chavín de Huántar.
The cult that thrived at Chavín de
Huántar spread throughout the Andes,
facilitated by drugs that came from
the Amazon. Vilca is a lowland plant
that must have been imported, probably along with feathers and animal
skins, although almost nothing of any
of these organic materials survives in
the archaeological record. Researchers
at Chavín de Huántar have discovered
stone bowls decorated with Amazonian
fish and snake motifs almost identical
to those found near Jaén, clear evidence
of trade ties, Burger says. The Marañón
River flows as straight as a highway
from Chavín de Huántar due north to
Montegrande, providing an obvious
trade route. Along with hallucinogens
came images and symbols. The jaguars
and monkeys carved in stone at Chavín
de Huántar could never actually live in
the frigid mountains nearby-they were
exotic jungle fauna. "Chavín de Huántar
was closely linked to the upper Amazon [near Jaén]," says Burger. "Chavín's
culture drew much of its religious myth
and ceremony from the forested slopes
of the upper Amazon."
Burger visited the Montegrande spiral last year before Olivera was forced
to rebury the site and post a 24-hour
guard to protect it pending conservation work and construction of a permanent roof. The spiral is perplexing
to Burger, and he isn't sure what it signifies. "It could be related to hallucinogens, but then it might be related to
other spiral phenomena such as whirlpools in rapids or the shape of various
kinds of shells," he says. The centrality
of hallucinogens in early Andean worship is clear, however, he adds. As they
faced a random universe, with its disease, earthquakes, and El Niño storms,
drugs gave them a way to understand
phenomena that went beyond ordinary
comprehension. They wanted to gain
power over the subconscious and use
ARCHAEOLOGY * July/August 2017

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