The Ancient Pots That Hint at Cannabis’s Early Use as a Drug
Incense burners recently unearthed in western China provide new evidence of marijuana’s ritual role, once known only from historic texts.
Marijuana can linger in the human system for
a few months at most, but cannabis residue will stick to other surfaces for millennia. High up in the Pamir Mountains, in what is now western China, archaeologists were excavating the tombs of Jirzankal Cemetery when they came upon a set of braziers and asked themselves what purpose the tools served. After analyzing the residue, a team of researchers found that it not only came from cannabis, but contained unusually high levels of THC—the compound that gives cannabis its psychoactive, or mind-altering, qualities.
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence pointing to the use of psychoactive cannabis in ancient Central Asia is purely textual: a section in Herodotus’s
Histories about the
Scythians, who, after funerals, would “throw the seed … upon the red-hot stones” and “shout for joy” as the vapor rose. But archaeological evidence has been harder to come by.
The team identified the chemical traces clinging to the burners using a technique that articulates a sample’s chemical signature. By vaporizing the sample, separating its components, and recording their differences in mass, researchers can identify the relative levels of the chemicals they’re looking at. “To our excitement, we identified the biomarkers of cannabis,” says Yimin Yang, another co-author of the study and a researcher at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. And not just cannabis, but a strain bursting with CBN, the compound that forms after THC metabolizes. (These Jirzankal Cemetery samples contained, however, noticeably low levels of CBD—a medicinal, nonpsychoactive compound favored by some cannabis users.) Higher than what are typically found in regional, wild cannabis plants, the CBN levels suggest that the ancient grave keepers deliberately sought out these mind-altering varieties, and potentially even domesticated them.