CHAVÍN DE HUÁNTAR, PERU—The subterranean corridor was lit only by eerie light that filtered down narrow ventilation shafts and reflected from polished stone. Priests huffed on decorated conch shell trumpets, sending deep blasts echoing against the cut stone walls of the narrow gallery. Using a bone tube, an attendant blew a powerful psychoactive snuff up the nose of a pilgrim, launching the recipient on a brief but explosive internal journey.
Archaeologists have long believed this 3000-year-old temple complex in a high and remote valley in the central Peruvian Andes was a center of drug rituals such as the scenario above. Carved friezes depict psychoactive plants and stone heads illustrate humans transforming into serpents, raptors, and jaguars. Trumpets made from Ecuadorean conch shells have been found near a circular plaza designed to amplify the sound of water rushing through an underground channel. Beneath the collection of stone buildings, excavators found an intricate network of galleries with the remains of dozens of polished graphite mirrors, as well as a 4.5-meter-tall granite stela of a fanged deity.
Such finds strongly suggested the practice of mind-altering rituals, but in 2016 a team led by Stanford University’s John Rick began to unearth what he calls “the smoking gun.” They uncovered a new gallery and spent two painstaking seasons excavating its floor. “It was crazy, we started to find all this material, including 21 bone tubes,” recalls Oscar Espinoza, a Ph.D. student at Tulane University. He led analyses of the tubes, which yielded traces of tobacco and something considerably more potent: seeds from the vilca tree, which contain bufotenine; dimethyltryptamine (DMT); and 5-MEO-DMT, a combination that produces short-lived but extremely intense visions.
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