Archaeologists Found Evidence of Ancient Psychedelic Rituals in Peru

By Luis Prada

May 18, 2025, 12:53pm

It’s 3,000 years ago. You’re 10,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes. You’ve been invited into a sacred stone chamber. You step inside. A priest hands you a bone tube filled with roasted vilca beans, a prehistoric version of DMT, and a little wild tobacco to smooth it out.

You take a hit and go on a cosmic ride that will echo through the ages. Publishing their findings in the journal PNAS, this is what archaeologists theorize is the current world’s oldest known psychedelic ceremony.

Long before the Incas, the Chavín called the Andes home, where its cultural elite—and only its most elite members—transformed themselves into divine beings by smoking themselves straight out of this plane of existence.

Archaeologists Just Found Ancient Evidence of Psychedelic Use In Peru

For the first time, researchers have found direct chemical evidence, not just speculations. Twenty-three artifacts, mostly hollow bone tubes, were dug up from a sealed-off ritual chamber that’s been untouched since 500 BCE. In those tubes, researchers found traces of wild tobacco and vilca, a hallucinogenic cousin of DMT.

More:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/archaeologists-found-evidence-of-ancient-psychedelic-rituals-in-peru/