Psychoactive drug use has great antiquity, and not only because taking drugs makes individuals feel good. In the distant past, as now, people also used drugs as tools for social bonding; for contacting the sacred/spiritual; for expressing identity; for manipulating others; and as aids in confronting culture-specific problems. In short, for millennia, drug consumption occupied a central place in the economic, political, religious and social life of human beings.
However, no written languages existed prior to 5000 BP. Consequently little knowledge remains in the 21st century of humanity’s 50-70,000 year tussle with psychoactive substances. I have attempted to salvage what does exist and compile it. My aim is to provide 21st century discussions of drug use with more context and usefulness than they presently possess.
‘Prehistoric’ refers to the period before a written language existed, or before a non-literate people came into sustained contact with a literate society; that is a society having the ability to record events in writing. So the term ‘prehistoric’ is relative. Great Britain’s settlement of Australia ended the prehistoric period for Aboriginal Australia, and Britain itself lost its ‘prehistoric’ status with the spread into Britain of the Roman Empire about the time of Christ.
When such confrontation begins, many details are often recorded about the life styles lifestyles of the non-literate group. Sometimes this provides examples of prehistoric drug use. This is one source I use both for general information and for three case studies of prehistoric drug-using communities.
- PNG field work: Learning some dance steps, celebrating a return to health.
In addition, I conducted field-work in the 1980s among a Papua New Guinea community currently producing, trading, and consuming psychoactive drugs. Even then, this community was isolated: neither cash nor shops, no electricity, no phones, no mail, no newspapers, almost no radios. No roads. What transport existed was a ten-hour trip by dug-out canoe to the nearest market village via crocodile—inhabited rivers and swamps. I sought this isolation. I believed that drug data I gathered in this situation could reveal analogies with drug behaviour in prehistoric communities which also produced, traded, and consumed psychoactive drugs.
In my field work research I drew upon both my anthropological training and my pharmacological background. I based my working hypotheses on the neurotransmitter dopamine and the effects of psychoactive drugs on the reward strata of mammal brains. I looked for correlation between drug production and distribution on the one hand and shifts in power, increase in regional trade and land-use patterns on the other.
The social nature of knowledge is a thread running through my blog. Knowledge is never just ‘out there’ waiting to be picked up by eager researchers.. Everywhere, social, economic, religious, and political forces determine which knowledge, and interpretations of knowledge, advance into a society’s mainstream thinking. Records of ancient and modern drug consumption illustrate this truth.
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Hi Pam, My name is Mohamed Adhikari, a historian at the University of Cape Town. Couldn’t find an email address for you anywhere so decided to use this channel to contact you. I would like to write to you about your excellent chapter in Dirk Moses’ Genocide and Settler Society. Please drop me a line at mohamed.adhikari@uct.ac.za
Also very interested in your book Frontier Lands and Pioneer Legends
Thanks Mohamed. I will send you a e-mail. Always happy to talk to someone with mutual interests. So long, Pam Watson.