Washington Post by Joel Achenbach 6/12/2019
Archaeologists have dug up evidence that people were catching a cannabis buzz way, way before Woodstock, before the Summer of Love and even before there were jazz clubs or alarmist movies warning of “Reefer Madness.†Apparently, the use of cannabis as a mind-altering substance dates back at least 2,500 years.
That’s the conclusion of a new study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, based on the chemical analysis of cannabis residues found by archaeologists in a burial site in the high mountains of western China.
The report does not change the historical consensus about early cannabis use, but it does add striking physical evidence for it. That consensus was previously based on disputed or ambiguous archaeological findings and on the account of the Greek historian Herodotus. Writing in the 5th century B.C., Herodotus described people in Central Asia burning the plant and inhaling the smoke in tentlike structures during burial ceremonies. He compared this ritual favorably to what went on in Greek bathhouses.
The residue of the cannabis burned at the western China site was found in wooden containers, or braziers, which held stones that could have been heated to create smoke from plant material. Laboratory tests showed that this cannabis was higher in the psychoactive chemical THC than most wild varieties of the plant. Researchers say they don’t know whether people had cultivated the plants, breeding them for higher THC, or had merely identified some rare varieties of the plant that had more of the buzz-inducing chemical.
The fact that this was done in conjunction with a burial suggests that the participants in the ceremony were using the cannabis “to communicate with nature, or spirits, or deceased people,†said the paper’s senior author, Yimin Yang, of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/06/12/archaeologists-find-signs-ritualized-cannabis-use-years-ago-china/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.31a09f318966
