Abstract
Residues from ancient artifacts can help identify which plant species were used for their psychoactive properties, providing important information regarding the deep-time co-evolutionary relationship between plants and humans. However, relying on the presence or absence of one or several biomarkers has limited the ability to confidently connect residues to particular plants. We describe a comprehensive metabolomics-based approach that can distinguish closely related species and provide greater confidence in species use determinations. An ~1430-year-old pipe from central Washington State not only contained nicotine, but also had strong evidence for the smoking of Nicotiana quadrivalvis and Rhus glabra, as opposed to several other species in this pre-contact pipe. Analysis of a post-contact pipe suggested use of different plants, including the introduced trade tobacco, Nicotiana rustica. Ancient residue metabolomics provides a new frontier in archaeo-chemistry, with greater precision to investigate the evolution of drug use and similar plant-human co-evolutionary dynamics.
Highlights
There is an increasing recognition of the deep-time co-evolutionary relationship between humans and certain psychoactive and medicinal plants, yet most of what we know about their past uses is rooted in analogy with practices observed in the present or recent past
Using what is called the biomarker approach, we addressed this question in the Pacific Northwest of North America, where we found nicotine-positive smoke implements predating the contact period (Tushingham et al, 2018)
We could conclude that deep-time continuity of indigenous smoking existed in a place where tobacco has been depicted as being introduced by early Euro-American traders and explorers and that “the spread of domesticated trade tobacco seems to have overtaken and obscured ancient indigenous tobacco practices” (Tushingham et al, 2018), the approach we previously used, based on biomarkers, could not distinguish between trade tobacco and local native Nicotiana species
Summary
There is an increasing recognition of the deep-time co-evolutionary relationship between humans and certain psychoactive and medicinal plants, yet most of what we know about their past uses is rooted in analogy with practices observed in the present or recent past. In the Pacific Northwest of North America, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi (AUV), Cornus sericea (CSE), Nicotiana attenuata (NAT), Nicotiana quadrivalvis (NQU), Nicotiana rustica (NRU), Nicotiana tabacum (NTA), Rhus glabra (RGL), and Taxus brevifolia (TBR) were the most common smoke plants used by indigenous peoples (Moerman, 1998) We outline here a comprehensive, metabolomics-based method for ancient residue analysis that can differentiate use of specific plants from closely related species This approach was applied to two archaeological pipes, a “post-contact” pipe (dating to the time following the arrival of Euro-Americans, and their trade goods, which occurs in the Northwest region by the end of the eighteenth century C.E.) and a “pre-contact” pipe, which dates to 1334–1524 calibrated radiocarbon years. The developed methods (i.e., experimental smoking of pipes, sequential extraction method, and chemical analysis) described here demonstrate the capabilities of metabolomics for archaeometric residue analysis and provide a specific approach that is robust and reliable
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