Browsing by Autor "Melanie J. Miller"

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Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America
(National Academy of Sciences, 2019) Melanie J. Miller; Juan Albarracín-Jordán; Christine Moore; José M. Capriles
Over several millennia, various native plant species in South America have been used for their healing and psychoactive properties. Chemical analysis of archaeological artifacts provides an opportunity to study the use of psychoactive plants in the past and to better understand ancient botanical knowledge systems. Liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) was used to analyze organic residues from a ritual bundle, radiocarbon dated to approximately 1,000 C.E., recovered from archaeological excavations in a rock shelter located in the Lípez Altiplano of southwestern Bolivia. The site is located at an elevation of ∼3,900 m above sea level and contains evidence of intermittent human occupations during the last 4,000 years. Chemical traces of bufotenine, dimethyltryptamine, harmine, and cocaine, including its degradation product benzoylecgonine, were identified, suggesting that at least three plants containing these compounds were part of the shamanic paraphernalia dating back 1,000 years ago, the largest number of compounds recovered from a single artifact from this area of the world, to date. This is also a documented case of a ritual bundle containing both harmine and dimethyltryptamine, the two primary ingredients of ayahuasca. The presence of multiple plants that come from disparate and distant ecological areas in South America suggests that hallucinogenic plants moved across significant distances and that an intricate botanical knowledge was intrinsic to pre-Columbian ritual practices.
The daily grind: Sex‐ and age‐related activity patterns inferred from cross‐sectional geometry of long bones in a pre‐Columbian muisca population from Tibanica, Colombia
(Wiley, 2018) Melanie J. Miller; Sabrina C. Agarwal; Lucero Aristizábal; Carl Henrik Langebaek
These results suggest that daily life may have been structured through patterns of routine labor that united and divided particular age and sex groups. Cross-sectional geometry data indicate women likely spent significant time and energy preparing food, especially grinding maize or other foods, while men may have done more long-distance walking potentially to work in agricultural fields or procure other resources.