Prehistoric Drug:Modern Relevance

The lower Pecos may not be the earliest place in the Americas where people utilized psychoactive drugs, but to date, it is the earliest evidence of drug use in the New World. As in ancient Egypt, in Pecos caves the dry desert air desiccated organic objects like wood, food, mescal bean, bone (lower rodent mandibles) woven objects (ritual basket), and cave paintings. The caves’ situation high up on cliffs removed any damage of water from flooding rivers below. Consequently, some remnants ofPecos actions and values remained for us to contemplate. Other in-coming Siberian peoples must have settled, searched and discovered replacements for the drugs they had used in their past homes, but conditions favoring preservation of their culture and their drug use did not exist,

FromPecos(and similar but unknown places) knowledge of visionary shamanism diffused outwards. As people gradually settled throughout  North Central, andSouth Americathey kept their ancient emphasis on shamanism. But the settlers needed additional pharmacognostic research.  Mescal bean itself grew only in a small area. Settlers moving beyond mescal bean’s natural distribution pattern  needed to continuously identify local psychoactive substances which would permit shamanic rituals, and hence community sustenance.

Their experimentation proved successful. By the time Europeans arrived, native Americans were utilizing between 80-100 psychoactive substances in a ritual context. In contrast, inEuropein the same period, people employed only about eight to ten psychoactive plants: alcohol (which is made from plants ) opium, a number of  tropane-containing plants (those ubiquitous true hallucinogens falsely suspected of being the active ingredients in pituri), and cannabis. Small ritual vessels found in rich burials in Bronze AgeBritainand elsewhere suggest to the archaeologist Sherratt that people may have burned and then inhaled not only cannabis but other mind-altering plants as yet unidentified

The anomaly of people utilizing more psychoactive plants in the New World than they did in the Old World intrigued many scholars including Richard Evans Schulte, an ethno-botanist and the recognized authority on New World hallucinogens, and Weston La Barre, a leading anthropologist in the fields of religion and psychology. Together, they posited that the reverse situation would be far more credible; that is, Old World societies should be utilizing more kinds of psychoactive plants than theNew Worldpeoples used.

The Old World has a greater land mass, a flora at least as rich and varied as theNew World, and probably the same number of hallucinogenic plants. Moreover, people have existed in parts of theOld Worldonwards since the time of proto-humans (that is, millennia before the emergence of Homo sapiens about 70 000 years ago). Consequently,Old Worldsocieties have had untold time to explore their environment and identify many mind-altering substances. Yet there is presently little evidence of this beyond the meager eight to ten plants already known.

Schultes and La Barre  speculated about this anomaly. They decided that  economic, social and religious changes account for the difference. Visionary shamanism complemented the hunting and gathering lifestyles which originally existed in both the Old and New World. As long as this lifestyle dominated, wide knowledge and use of drug plants existed. But when societies in Europe and Eurasia turned to farming in the Neolithic period—which began in varied times in varied places some time after 10 000 BPE and before about 2 000BPE—people of that time found visionary shamanism less valuable or appropriate, and knowledge of psychoactive plants slowly declined. The intolerant fanaticism of Old Worldreligions, particularly Christianity and Islam, added further impetus to the trend. These patriarchal, monotheistic belief systems transformed areas where their values took hold and almost, but not quite, eliminated many drug-using Old Worldcommunities.  However, when Christianity arrived in the Middle and South Americasin the 15^th century, it attacked drug-related shamanism but it lacked the force to significantly defeat it. Consequently, a pharmacopoeia of useful psychoactive plants remained within the public domain.

What is ironic is that Catholicism, which had helped destroy visionary shamanism, itself ensures that the structural link between the supernatural and the psychoactive continuously repeats itself acrossEuropeand beyond.  In the Mass, the priest miraculously changes the psychoactive alcohol (wine) into the blood of Christ; The priest  drinks the chalice of  Christ’s blood; and under its authority the priest bestows Christ’s blessing on his people. The priest delivers a sermon to the congregation which outlines and interprets Christ’s suffering for, and affirmations to, humanity, and, in turn, humanity’s obligations to Christ. Even suffering exists as a mutual ingredient. The shaman usually displays the effects of the toxic drug used: tremors, vomiting, spasms or loss of consciousness etc.  These validate the shaman, and are taken as his willingness to suffer to aid others.

The ancient link between psychoactive substance and religion resonates today, I believe. The connection between wine and the Blood of Christ is so momentous and intrinsic to Catholic beliefs and ritual, that the Church finds it impossible to classify alcohol as just one psychoactive substance among many. Hence, its continuous use of the phrase ‘alcohol and drugs’ particularly damaging inVaticanhealth directives to medical professionals.

Another echo of the supernatural/drug linkage appears in the ‘drug-active/ people-passive’ construction. There can be no doubt than in the ancient past, chance encounters between individuals and psychoactive plants must have awed the accidental user. Drug plants which seemed to conjure up supernatural beings and altered consumers’ minds and emotions quite naturally appeared active and powerful in respect to humans. This may explain how the concept began that drugs could ‘alter’ behavior, ‘cause’ mishaps, ‘ruin’ judgments, etcetera..

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Finally, an irony:  Despite the United States’ intolerance of psychoactive drugs, except psychoactive alcohol, theUnited Statesincludes inTexasthe area where people had continuously consumed the same drug (mescal bean) for longer than any one psychoactive drug has been consumed elsewhere.

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Shamanism in PecosCaves

Among the remains of ancient thought and deed which the dry conditions of the Pecos caves preserved, a globular twined basket (woven shut) almost shouts ‘ritual activity’. This useful archaeological term implies that the activities or objects in question were used in ‘special ways’ not intrinsic to their everyday nature. For example, finding bread and a gold cup in a special niche in a Catholic Church correctly implies that  the bread’s significance lies far beyond the usual relief of hunger, that consuming the bread acted out spiritual  or non-material values.

 When forcefully opened, the basket revealed sticks of red pigment,, mescal bean, the toxic Mexican Buck-eye seed (Ungnadia specio) and 10 halves of rodent lower left mandibles: plus one rodent lower right mandible, and some miscellaneous items. Rodent jaws, left or right, are intrinsically unnecessary for either painting or altering consciousness So sequestering them together clearly points to ritual activity. At some ancient time, one or more individuals gathered these things together, intending to manipulate them somehow, and speak to spiritual beings about their peoples’ anxieties and need for productive hunts.  

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 Shamanism left no smoking gun in Pecos caves. But the cumulative evidence is striking. It leads to accepting shamanism as a more logical  explanation for events than any other. There is the Pecos  peoples’ descent from their drug/shaman/hunting complex in the Siberian past;  the cave paintings delineating bizarre creatures in exultant poses; impaled deer; and mescal bean sometimes streaming like exhaust gases from flying figures. There is the fact that mescal bean (sometimes half-cooked) appears in every layer of the archaeological sites for about 12 000 years; the tremendous social and physical effort these paintings cost the cave inhabitants; and the number of reputable scholars and other observers who endorse the paintings as portraying shamanistic scenes.

 If this is true, the connection between the drug and the spiritual endured through  what seems like an encyclopedia of human history.Pecos people linked the two more than five millennia before the build-up of Mesopotamian civilizations. When Zoroaster, Jesus Christ, Buddha and Mohamed began their ministries, mescal bean had long been intrinsic to the getting of wisdom and spiritual guidance in part o North America. Visionary shamanism was the style of leadership in Pecos when Moses led the Jews from Egypt. Shamanism in Pecos ceased only when Spanish settlers from Mexico decimated  the Pecos population, virtually the same moment in time (1588) as Elizabeth l of England  demolished the Spanish Amada

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Pecos Cave Painting Descriptions

There are more than 44 caves with paintings, and new ones have been recorded within living memory. The paintings are striking, especially the polychrome panoramas. These exist roughly along the same undulating, horizontal plane, sometimes more that 50 yards in length. See previous post. A street scene comes to mind, but one that is a phantasmagoria, in which strange participants gaze outwards at the viewer. There are people, deer, and cougars. Towering above both, are monumental, roughly rectangular shapes, like aberrant doors or ironing boards. Many have tiny thin arms and small, stumpy legs, the latter resembling those on upholstered chairs. None have human heads or features. In fact some have no heads at all. Others—still faceless—sport small-scale floppy rabbit ears, small birds’ heads, horns or antlers.

‘Anthropomorphic’ is the technical term for figures which mix human and animals features, but this word seems inadequate here. It lacks reference to the inanimate shapes which are so strikingly combined here with human and non-human animals. In their right hand these ‘creatures’ (as I prefer to name them) carry hunting weapons: atalatls (or dart throwers) plus supplies of darts. The left grasps short sticks or wands which terminate in globular shapes. Hairy draped objects fall across some arms; others sport bracelets; some figures wear feathered necklaces. There are deer in flight, many pierced by darts. These figures and the connection with hunting are the focal point of all paintings of this period. (Newcomb 1969).

The artists employ four colours only: red and dark red; black and, very sparingly, a mustard like-ochre. Most figures are solid colours with a narrow contrasting edge; red and black form the common oppositions; altogether an elegant look. A feeling of ascending momentum pervades the murals. A few creatures appear suspended in mid-air with crescents of red dots below their feet . See small figure in upper middle of the illustration in the last post. Some shamanic figures are actually flying upwards or streaking across the sky, streams of red dots in their wake like exhaust gases. Besides these spectacular motifs, less startling ones also convey the impression of upward movement. Many creatures have upraised arms like preachers addressing their flock, while other shapes taper sharply downwards, suggesting ascension. Within this general outline, the shamanic forms show a degree of variation.

Just when the paintings began is a mystery. Cave art has a limited life span; several Pecos paintings which vibrated with colour 80 years ago appear very faint today. The earliest paintings still in existence now probably went up on the limestone cave walls around the time people laboured over the Great Pyramid in Egypt, or heaved and sweated, dragging upright the megaliths of Stonehenge in England. That is, about 4500 BP. The last vestiges of art only narrowly preceded the coming of the railway to Texas in 1881 (Newcomb 1967 )

This stretch of time encompassed four distinct styles. What I have described above is the earliest of the four—the so-called ‘Pecos River Style’ dated 4 500 to 3 200 B.P.. W.W. Newcomb, at the time Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas , and a specialist in North American Indian cultures, discussed some interpretations of the ‘Pecos River Style’ murals in his book The Rock Art of Texas Indians (1967) co-authored with Forrest Kirkland. Newcomb agreed with the suggestion made in 1958 by an earlier observer, T.N. Campbell, that the anthropomorphic figures were shamans, possibly ancient representatives of Indian religious fraternities.

Newcomb noted that every element in the paintings could be interpreted in these terms. For example, the red dots in the painting may represent mescal beans which are red. Newcomb suggests the custom of painting shelter walls may have began when a shaman emerged from a trance and attempted to visualize his dreams in a painting. Perhaps a spirit figure ordered to the shaman to paint the cave walls. At first the paintings may have belonged to just one or two shaman fraternities, but eventually the custom became a popular or perhaps an essential one. Ultimately the practice waned for some reason. It may be that new rituals developed and displaced the old. Or internal changes in the societies made painting obsolete or even forbidden. (Newcomb(. P.65-79)

Newcomb suggests that the paintings of the murals took place regularly, perhaps in the cold of winter, or alternatively, timed to some seasonal event such as the harvest time of various plant foods or the occasion of communal hunts. The latter situations would ensure the plethora of food necessary to support a larger than normal gathering of people.  Such displays of ancient rituals and power must have inspired and exalted others shamanS, Newcomb believes, and reconciled them to the hardship of their brief lives.

 The anthropologists Solveig Turpin who has spent decades exploring and writing about the Lower Pecos people expresses similar ideas about the emotional impact of these rituals, as enabling Pecos shamans to transcend human life—to die and be reborn; to intercede for people; to take animal shape and influence the hunt to predict the future and be the keeper of the past (Turpin )

The social costs involved in producing the Pecos River Style murals must have been considerable in terms of time and effort. Collecting, and grinding the four colours alone took a toll. Additionally he pigments required addition of some binding substance, possibly extracted from the hooves of members of the deer family. Even the act of painting required more than the usual effort because many figures were solidly in-filled with colour. To achieve this on the uneven limestone surfaces, paint had to be laid down thickly, and carefully worked into the nooks and crevices. Also, scaffolding was essential as many murals stretch far above the reach of the observer while others grace the ceilings. That meant wood had to be found in the desert and hauled up or down the cliff face and then lashed into shape. These are significant costs.

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An Overview of Ancient Pecos 1

Pecospeople occupied an arid desert  with a limestone basis. There are flat plains, narrow valleys, canyons and overhanging cliffs. Into the latter the weather gouges deep incisions. As some of these rocky indents face away from the icy northern winds, the  Paleo-Indians favoured  them as shelter. They and their successors  slept and lived there regularly for many millennia—but  always intermittently. As hunter/ gatherers, they had to go where the food was, that week or that month or that season.

 The  extreme dryness of the area,  plus the fact that the sites of occupation were high above ground and possible contamination from occasional flooding, produced peak conditions for the preservation of organic materials: that is leaves, fibres hair, seeds, foods, animal flesh. Normally these decay rapidly and vanish, long  before archaeologists can record their presence and evaluate  possible meaning.  But in the Pecos sites, the dryness preserved  relics of ancient thoughts and deeds. There are mescal bean, gigantic cave paintings, ritual baskets—woven shut—other esoteric objects and ochres. These artefacts, plus other considerations, make a good case for drug –induced visionary shamanism as fact, rather than solely as academic speculation.

 One of the indents—Bonfire Shelter—is particularly informative. About 14 000 years ago  something, or perhaps someone, caused a massive stampede of  many now-extinct Ice Age animals—mammoth, long-horned bison, camel, antelope and more. The rush flowed over the cliff top immediately above Bonfire Shelter, and took the beasts to their deaths below the shelter entrance. Were people involved? Nobody knows for sure. However patterns in the way animal bones were broken do suggests human interference, although archaeologists found no decisive proof. 

But by the next three stampedes over the cliff, at about10 400 B.P.  a firm picture emerges (Adovasio  & Fry 1976) . Carbon 14 dating places together in the one contemporaneous layer the bones of  prehistoric animals, the characteristic tools the Paleo-Indians used to butcher these beasts, and the mescal bean we assume the people employed to fore-shadow and manage the capture of these beasts.  This it is the earliest  place in North America ( possibly in all the Americas)  where we known people  used psychoactive substances.  In subsequent excavations, archaeologists found large quantities of mescal bean at every level of human occupation at  Bonfire shelter, right up to about 1000 before present day. 

Mescal bean litters more than 12 similar rock shelters in the Pecos area and in nearby northMexico. Sometimes it is present in enormous quantities, and sometimes it is partially cooked. Research has reliably and extensively  dated the age of many of these sites and their contents such as fibre, drugs, and ritual paraphernalia.  The Smithsonian Instituate alone conducted 44 Carbon-14 determinations,  and theUniversityofMichiganan earlier series of 11. However, among the many shelters, only BonfireCaveand one other sheltered Paleo-Indian big-game hunters. Occupation of the other caves by later ‘Archaic’ Indians  began  slightly later, around 9 000 B. P.

Much changed in the social and environmental areas of  Pecos in the following  10 000  years. Although mescal bean use continued, big-game animals vanished with the retreat of the Ice Age, and fear of starvation replaced fear of large and savage beasts. Deer became the principle prey. But such was the aridity of the desert, the population were forced to turn to mice, rabbits, fish, and birds to obtain most of their  protein; people even ground down bone and ate it. Over time, new groups of hunter/ gatherers with different cultural histories entered the desert area. The influence of neighbouring groups ebbed and flowed. Alterations in hunting technology took place: from spear thrower and dart to bows and arrows and, much later, to rifles. Evidence appears of use of two, possibly three, drugs  in addition to mescal bean: first, Mexican buckeye seed (Ungnadia speciosa) and later two hallucinogens, peyote (Lophophora williamsii) and a species of the Datura genus.  

It all came to an end for the Pecos people about 1590 when the Spanish crossed the Rio Grande and penetrated the Pecos area. They did not remain  long. The difficult terrain, dearth of minerals, lack of arable land and sparse population drove the Spaniards further east or west. Nevertheless, their brief tenure destroyed thePecos population. Some individuals were taken as slaves; some died of disease, some of starvation; others lost their lives in warfare or indirectly due to  the destruction of their social system. In a sense, it was not use of mescal bean which ended in thePecos community, it was the community itself which died out,  

This is the bare bones of the story. There is more. The next post describes the 10 000 year old link between mescal bean use and the spiritual guidance and help shamanism provided thePecos people.

 

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Mescal Bean in Pecos River Societies

 

Controversy has arisen concerning the spectre of prehistoric ‘drug’ use despite ample evidence of the ritual and medicinal importance of such psychoactive plants in many Indian cultures in theNew World. Politically correct or not, the use of these plants was part and parcel of shamanistic ritual in theLower Pecosas elsewhere in the hunter-gatherer world.                                                                                                                   

www. texasbeyondhistory (UniversityofTexa at Austin)

My pituri research delighted me. I had identified something previously unsuspected (by non Aboriginal people) about Aboriginal culture: the pharmacognostic skills Aboriginal people displayed with the drug pituri, its plant basis, and its effects on human physiology.  Simultaneously, this provided a new dimension for thinking about Aboriginal exploitation of  land and  flora, and the mechanisms of Aboriginal  trade.  In  1983 the Universityof Sydneypublished my pituri research as a monograph entitled This Precious Foliage: A Study of the Aboriginal Psycho-active Drug Pituri. 

Given this, I felt confident that anthropology and pharmacognosy were not  mutually exclusive. I could continue in this field, and, if necessary, deal with academic opposition by mounting a persuasive claim that  the  Department of Anthropology was too narrow in its approach.  So I turned to two other examples of prehistoric drug use. In both cases, white observers singled out for notice among the jumble, the blood and the confusion of colonization, native use of psychoactive drugs.

During researching pituri, I had read Peter Furst’s book  Hallucinogens and Culture (1976). It drew my attention to the people of the Lower Pecos River in Texas.  What particularly  took my interest were the similarities between Pesos people and Australian Aborigines. Both were desert-dwelling  hunter- gatherers with sparse populations; both consumed  a local psychoactive substance;  both drugs were toxic with similar effects on human beings;  for both communities their socially-sanctioned drug use considerably pre-dated European ettlement;  And in both communities, (but for different reasons) European contact terminated consumption of their  favoured drug.  

Because of these parallels, I decided to collate all available information on Pecos drug use and contrast it with Aboriginal consumption with pituri. I though this migh  highlight missing events in one or other of the early colonial records of the two drug-using societies.  What was done in one society and not in the other perhaps ,or conversely, what might—must—have taken place in each society yet went unrecorded by white colonialists.

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 Climate changes experienced in the Old World during the last Ice Age account for Ice Age people settling in what is now Texas.  Falling sea levels in the Bering Strait  between Siberia and Alaska created a land bridge between  north-east Asia and north America.  Probably before 15 000 B.P (that is Before the Present)  people from Siberia on the Asia side began spreading,  inch by inch, and mile by mile, across the  newly exposed land. Gradually, these ‘Paleo-Indians’ entered a New World, teeming with birds, animal and plants, with great rivers and soaring mountains, but, so far as is presently  known, devoid of human beings.

The cultural baggage the travellers carried with them was what they and their forebears had known and lived with in the Northern Hemisphere  of the Old World. Three components were significant:  Both peoples practiced hunter-gatherer way of life in which stalking and killing mega fauna supplied most of their food. Secondly, Ice-Age hunters turned to shamansfor their  emotional and spiritual needs.  Finally, sacred narcotic or hallucinogenic plants enabled the shamans to contact or ‘channel’ spirit beings–gods, images and animal spirits. These spirits provided advice and guidance on hunting and other issues. 

In 1970 Professor Richard Evans Schultes, at that time Director of Harvard’s Botanical Museum and the foremost scholar in ethno-pharmacology  got together with Weston La Barre, a leading scholar in the anthropology and psychology of religion. They believed that the newly arrived Ice-Age Siberian migrants in northernAmerica would have soon set about identifying  local psychoactive substances in  the unfamiliar environment.   This must have occurred, they argued, for the incomers to maintain their belief system and way of life: to facilitate shamans in entering  trance states, to see and contact spirits to manipulate the animal world, to advise and influence others, and  cure social and physical ills. (Furst 1976:2)

That is what happened with one small band of Paleo-Indian hunters and food gatherers. They moved into, and onto, what is now known as the Lower Pecos River area in Texas, near that State’s border with northeast Mexico. Probably soon after their arrival, the group identified a local psychoactive substance. This was the poisonous, dark red, seed of the Texas Mountain Laurel bush (Sophora secundiflora),  known as mescal bean  or the Texas Mountain Laurel. (N.B. this is not mescaline)  This plant belongs to the Pea family, and it is native to the  vast  Chihuahuan Desert in North Mexico andTexas.

Because mescal bean has no social or economic importance today,  little on-going research  about the drug occurs. In 1957 (p. 708) the anthropologist  La Barre described mescal bean as ‘a violent and dangerous substance’- a description both graphic and accurate. Chemically, its active ingredient, cytisine, is a ‘cousin’ of nicotine and it effects human physiology in an  extremely similar manner. Toxic effects include:

nausea and vomiting, dilation of the pupils, tachycardia [excessive rapidity and irregularity of the heart-beat] followed by dizziness, mental confusion, muscular incoordination and weakness, and convulsions; respiratory paralysis may occur leading to death by paralysis (Martindales Extra Pharmacopoeia p1746)  

From this technical pharmacological description,  mescal bean  is not a ‘true’ hallucinogen; that is, it does not  invariably  produced hallucinations; however, some observers of mescal bean  consumption dispute this. Nevertheless, one way or another,  mescal bean certainly alters consciousness. The apparent pay-off  for consuming this drug lay not only in  the experience of intoxication, but in the drug’s capacity to produce, or aid in producing, the visions necessary for shamanic rituals and  ceremonies.

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Prehistoric Drug: Modern Relevance

Prehistoric Drug: Modern Relevance

 Pituri is an example of the usefulness and validity found in studying prehistoric drugs.  Firstly, it demolishes two drug stereotypes: the idea that alcohol is the only psychoactive substance capable of occupying a central place in the economic, political, religious and social life of human beings, and, in the same vein, the concept that drug use among ‘primitive’ or prehistoric  people is primitive, set about by mystery and flummox, and haphazard controls over use.

 Pituri use among Aboriginal people was never a brief enthusiasm, a sudden chance development. It was a 5 000 year commitment (Yen 1983). Aboriginal people embedded their cultural values and their social structures in managing all aspects of this psychoactive drug.  Restrictions over knowledge—a cultural feature in continent-wide Aboriginal societies—bore chiefly on the production process. Knowledge of two critical issues—the specific locations of plants selected and the temperature of the fires employed in the curing process—belonged only to a few revered elders. Both were closely guarded secrets.  Clans from a number of tribes with a pituri totem held the monopoly of pituri distribution, at least at the primary level. The very nature of gerontology—in which revered senior men receive  society’s greatest benefits—acted to limit pituri use and keep it away from all women and younger men, except possibly in the case of male initiation ceremonies.

 Aboriginal people in pituri-producing areas must have experimented extensively with both plant and drug; another testimony to Aboriginal  commitment. The result was great practical knowledge of nicotine in both the plant and in the human body; perhaps particularly in the employment of both stimulant and depressant phases of nicotine use and in utilizing nicotine’s transdermal qualities. It was certainly a wider awareness than the incoming British colonials possessed after four or five centuries of exposure to the nicotine in tobacco—in fact,  more than the average smoker has today.

 Another reason to access prehistoric drug use is that it increases our knowledge base. Many concerns relating to drug use today, can be glimpsed ‘acted out’ in prehistoric societies. For example, issues relating to social and economic transformations accompanying drug production and trade, questions about whether legalising drugs would diminish the problems supposedly caused by illegal drugs, and whether demand or supply predominates in initiating drug trading.

Pituri history suggests that, at least sometimes, it is the nature of the drug itself that causes social and economic dislocation rather than the drug’s legal/illegal status. Insufficient information exists about pituri production to form firm conclusions, but certainly the amount of the drug pituri in circulation seems far in excess of what natural growth patterns of Duboisia hopwoodii plants would allow. This suggests that Aboriginal people intensified pituri production in some way, perhaps by manipulating the root stock.  A significant event: ‘plant intensification’ is a buzz word for anthropologists, paleobotanists,  archaeologists and others. It signals that a population may  be beginning a transformation away from hunter/gathering life-styles to horticulture.

Pituri trade too displayed increasing complexity. Exchange of goods among  hunter/gatherers everywhere had been widely researched. Almost invariably, the pattern is one in which known partners exchange goods with one another, and the relationship between the two men is of more significance than what is exchanged. Marshall Sahlins, at the time Professor of Anthropology atUniversityofChicagoand doyen of this field (1974:299) claims of  Aiston’s account ofLake Eyreexpeditions to the north to gain pituri north :

The nearest documented approach to open market trading appears to be on the one hand, a kind of auctioning, involving competition within the demand party only, as testified in certain Eskimo and Australian material  (Sahlins 1974:299).  

 ‘Open market trading’ is a large departure from hunter/gatherer norms. But note also the reference to ‘ competition within the demand partly only’. This is additional to the other references given in a previous post to pituri initiating trade.

Finall, a recent publication Ochre and Rust (2007) by Philip Jones, anthropologist and Senior Curator at theSouthAustralianMuseum provided me with a new insight. Aiston’s account ofLake Eyre expeditions has members taking with them 70 pound cakes of  special red ochre ‘the vital ingredient’ without which pituri could not be obtained. On first reading Aiston I noted the common features of both trade items: their brief ‘shelf lives,’ and  probable community pressure to renew supplies of both. And I realised for the first time that high demand for pyschoactive substances must be problematic for prehistoric communities without a currency.  After all, how many stone axes and emu feathers can a man accept in exchange for drugs? So at the time of reading Aiston,  it was the exchange of psychoactive substances for red ochre that struck me. Red ochre was a means of self/community expression. So it too would quickly need replenishment: a neat solution I thought to the problem posed by addictive drugs in prehistoric exchange.  

But in the recent publication Ochre and Rust, Jones describes this particular red ochre as featuring in an important Dreamtime/Creation story. The ochre was the Blood of the slaughtered Ancestral Emu. Jones claims it was:

‘a medium or agent of transcendence: from sickness to health, death to renewal, ritual uncleanness to cleanness, the secular to the sacred’

Knowing this, leads me to rethink my opinion that I could find no evidence of shamanism or other rituals attached to pituri.  The latter is still true (I could not find evidence). But Aboriginal people would be most unlikely to exchange a sacred religious icon for something secular. So in my opinion both the pituri and this particular ochre linked together in some vital religious ritual.     

Bibliography

 Jones,  Philip.  (2007)  Ochre and Rust . Adelaide: Wakefield Press.

Sahlins, Marshall. (1974)  Stone Age Economics.  London: Butlerand Tsnner.

Yen, D. E. (1983) ‘Pituri and Prehistory’ [Book Review]  Australian Archaeology, No 17.

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My  next few posts examine mescal bean. In my knowledge, this psychoactive substance is unique: it is the drug plant with the longest continuous period of consumption in the one  geographic region.  

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