 Hi, welcome everyone to Ask an Archaeologist. I'm Niko Tripsovich, the host of today's show. Ask an Archaeologist is a series of live streamed interviews co-hosted by the Archaeological Research Facility and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. In this series, UC Berkeley Archaeologists and others who work with archaeological materials discuss their research and answer audience questions. For those of you joining us live today, you can post your questions in the live chat box. You can find adjacent to the YouTube video. In today's show, the director of the Archaeological Research Facility, Dr. Christine Hastorf, a curator at the Hearst Museum and a professor in the UC Berkeley Anthropology Department, will be speaking with Colin Domnauer. Colin Domnauer just received his BA from UC Berkeley in the Planetary Science. Colin did a senior thesis research with Dr. Hastorf focusing on investigating the iconography of a culturally significant hallucinogenic plant in the pre-Columbian Andes. So welcome Colin and Christine. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to start our meeting today by just introducing the situation. This is really kind of common at UC Berkeley where we faculty keep classes and get students engaged in new themes and subjects. And I was teaching Andean Archaeology several years ago and Colin was one of 30 or so students in the class and he just was particularly interested in some aspects of the archaeology, which he's going to tell you about. And so we chatted about various aspects and luckily there was also a series of lectures going on at the Phoebe Hearst Museum last year, I guess it was, on sort of altered states of various kinds and that was associated with an exhibit and Colin attended that. I saw him there at several events. Anyway, out of all that we started talking and he developed this project that he's going to explain and describe, but I just wanted to let you know that this does happen and what's really particularly wonderful about this is some new information has come out of his project and he also used a lot of the Hearst Museums material. So that makes it particularly special today. So I'd like to introduce Colin who just as Niko Stead just graduated and is going to try and write this up for a small publication, which is also pretty neat. So here's Colin to tell you about what he did in that project. Yeah, so let me share my screen. I have some slides show. Okay, can you all see that? Okay, so the focus of my research, like Christine said, was on this, the plant use, this religious plant use in pre-Columbian Andes. And just to show you guys, give you a geographical context. The cultures that we'll be mentioning today, I boxed in black. So we have the Chavin culture, which occupied the central islands from roughly 900 to 200 BC and contemporaneous with them was the Paracus culture of the southern coast. And then descendants of the Paracus culture were Nazca, which are well known for the Nazca lions and geoglyphs. And they were flourishing around 100 to 800 AD and the Moche culture on the northern coast were similar time period. So the focus of my research was on this hallucinogenic plant called anodinanthra, which is commonly known as Vilca. And it's the most ancient and widely used visionary plant in pre-Columbian shamanism in South America. And the way it's used is they take these seeds out of the seed pods, roast them over the fire, grind them into a fine powder, and then blow them. Usually up the nose is how they ingest them. And it was utilized for this effect of being able to transform the shaman into a altered state and sort of a journey into the so-called spirit world or supernatural world. And we have evidence for its use going back over 4,000 years in South America. And that was from chemical analysis of certain artifacts. But more commonly, the way we establish evidence of its use is through analyzing the artwork that these cultures have left behind. So here is a stone carving from the Chaveon culture. And you can see these decorated all over this figure are these seed pods with the constricted seeds and the leaves of anodinanthra symmetrical. And this being is sort of half human, half animal animal features like the sharp teeth and the clawed feet are the transformation into animal form is a central theme throughout shamanism. And that's sort of what's being depicted here as he's decorated with Vilca, which is the sort of vehicle of his transformation. So it's not always that clearly depicted, as in that example, and a lot of these cultures portrayed particularly the plant use in more stylized and abstract ways. So scholars have done previous work identifying certain forms and symbols that represent Vilca in the iconographic record. And these include like these paired V shaped circles representing the flowers, this kind of comb like leaf symmetrical form representing the leaves and then this hanging column of circles is seen in a variety of different forms, but that represents the Vilca seeds themselves. So this was used by scholars to search through these ancient cultures iconography and identify that this plant was used and depicted by these cultures, but these symbols alone left large gaps in the record and cultures like Nazca and Paracas were major Indian cultures, but still exhibited no evidence of using any hallucinogenic plants, even though they we suspected they should be because this was a central theme of South American shamanism. So that was really the motivation for my research was to look through the iconography more carefully in these cultures and see if I could identify any new symbols that might be representative of this plant Vilca. And the major finding I came across was this well-known motif that was had been written about and identified as a common occurrence in Nazca and Paracas called the ball and chain motif, which I have arrows pointing through here in some Paracas textiles. And while this motif was documented as a common occurrence, no one had ever written about what it might signify or mean. And in my work, I collected many examples of its depiction and looked at the context that it was being portrayed in and certain themes emerged, which were that it was always associated with some sort of supernatural or mythical being, which is likely a shaman as we see in these images. The portrayal of them falling or flying through the sky is this idea of magical flight is another central theme of shamanism that is perpetuated by this feeling of leaving your body in the trance. So that's the first clue and then the other clue was that it was often portrayed in a context of other culturally significant plants. So in this image, we see some beans and maybe root vegetables being portrayed and in the central image, in each side of each of these streamers, we see like beans or chili peppers and the star is identifiably the San Pedro cactus, which is another shamanic plant in South America. And then also this ball and chain motif. So in this context, the symbol is associated with plants and shamanism, which suggests that it is a vilpe that's being portrayed here as it fits both those categories. And then the last example, again with the San Pedro cactus and this sort of transforming figure. But what's unique about this example is this being is holding a long tube, which is a snuffing tube, which is how this, as you recall that image I showed earlier, is how it was consumed as blown up the nose through the snuffing tube. So here this textile portrays in one image the snuffing tube, a transforming being and another Hulu San General plant in the Andes and this ball and chain motif. So that strongly suggests that this was representing this vilpe seed and the visual similarity is there as well, obviously. So a large part of my research was using the Hearst Museum on campus, their collection archive. They have over in the South America section, they have over 10,000 images of artifacts online that anyone can access. And that was a really great resource for me to look through and do my research and I was able to identify this motif and certain artifacts housed on campus. So now we're looking at the Nazca culture, which is later than Paraguas, descendants from them. And again, we see this this ball and chain motif being portrayed here. And this whole image is kind of reminiscent of on the last slide, this streamer in the the bottom right corner, but just kind of blown up onto the whole pot itself. So which is what we would expect as these cultures, this Nazca did descend from the Paraguas culture and so we see them sort of continuing this tradition of portraying this symbol of vilpe. In this pot from the Hearst Museum, it's depicting on the left a so-called masked or mythical being and wrapped around the circumference is this constricted ball and chain motif, which resembles the vilpe seeds. And then this Nazca ball is more abstract, but it does have some of the attributes that previous scholars have identified with vilpe, namely this paired circles representing the flowers on the column of vertical column of dots representing the seed pods and possibly this comb-like symmetrical thing symbol representing the symmetrical leaves. This one I'm not so sure about, but it was an interesting resemblance. And then the last artifact from the Hearst Museum I used was this moche period textile. Moche was on the northern coast of Peru, contemporaneous with Nazca and is a different style of portraying vilpe. It's not the ball and chain motif per se, but it does have this vertical column of circles with sort of kneeling figures and then sprouting from their heads are this V-shaped paired circles, another common symbol of vilpe. So in all cases, we see this symbol associated with and really attached to the bodies of the shamans, which I think represents is trying to convey the fact that this plant was sort of inseparable from the shaman, that the shaman could not work, perform their acts of transformation without the aid of Vilpe and the Vilpe served as the vehicle carried on the shaman through their journey through the spirit world. So I think it's really cool to be able to look at the iconography of these ancient cultures and see how they depicted their relationship with this plant and it sort of allows us to understand, to give a window into like the very minds and souls of these people who lived 3,000, 2,000 years ago, as we're able to say something about a very visceral and direct experience that they performed in their ceremonial and religious lives. And still today we can see this practiced not in the Andes, but in some tribes in the Amazon using this plant. So it's existed over thousands of years, at least 4,000 years, and was significant enough to be portrayed in their textiles, ceramics, and stone architecture. Terrific. Thank you, Colin. So I wanted to remind our viewers that we are online here with Colin Domnauer and Christine Hastor for 15 more minutes, and that you can post your questions in the live chat box adjacent to our YouTube video stream. And we've received a couple of questions. I don't know if these are questions that Colin or Christine would like to feel, but why don't I just put them out there and perhaps they'll be part of the conversation coming up. So we have a question about the function of the textiles. Can you tell us more about the functions of the textiles that have these depictions of Vilca and San Pedro, who would have worn and used them, and what was their archaeological context? Would you like, Colin, do you want to say something about that? Well, some of these textiles were used in Paracas culture as burial wrappings for their dead. They would wrap, sort of mummify their dead, and in these elaborate re-decorated textiles, and these would sort of, in their worldview, the death was not the end of the individual, it was more of a transformation or a gateway into the spirit world. And so the fact that Vilca is being portrayed on these textiles may be an attempt to convey its role as a sort of intermediary between worlds. And that's what a shaman is. A shaman is one who can transcend this world temporarily, inhabit that other world. So I think that's maybe what they were attempting to convey here. Well, do you have more context for us, Dr. Hastorf? Well, the textiles, the Paracas textiles especially, are from this peninsula in southern Peru that these fragments would have come from. There are a few complete ones, and these, of course, these are fragments being published that you're looking at here. So these scholars would have gone to Peru, probably, to study these. But they, you know, they clearly must have taken a long time to make. You know, the people's families or themselves would have spent their whole lives first weaving and then embroidering. You can see these are the ones on the left, especially are embroidered, which is quite wonderful. So they could have been acts or actions that occurred of these individuals or they could have been just, you know, very, very important beings and images and events or wishes that the individuals would have. But the individual places that these came from, one would have to go back to those individual publications that you see listed there and see exactly which burial and which site that those came from. But Paracas especially are primarily from burials. Now the moche, again one would have to go and look at that, but if I'm not mistaken, the material from the first comes from burials. So I'm guessing that that too also will be a burial shroud. The fragment, these are all fragments. These are all small pieces, small images. These images that we're looking at here are probably, Colin, you can correct me, but I imagine they're going to be like five inches long, maybe something, you know, like that long. They probably aren't much bigger than that. So they're very small and there are many of them found all around the edges of these shrouds. Great. We have a couple of more questions have come in. One person asks, are you able to look at material from other museums to see if you can identify that motif in their collections? Yeah, that's what I did with my research. In this presentation, I just talked about what I found from the Hearst Museum on campus. But that was just a section of my research. I did look at other museums and publications and just in the archaeological record in general, I didn't limit myself to the Hearst. Before you go on, if I could add something. He did this primarily this past spring. And so his work was really using publications. And that's why you see these on this page, we're looking at you see these references. So he was going and using people who've published on these things before and given these photos in their publications. And the Hearst material was all online. So he could do it from the comfort of his own shelter-in-place home when it came down to it. So for a short three, four, five, six-month project, there's a lot online now and or published that you can do. But if I'm not mistaken, Colin, you did not go into any whether it was the Hearst or any other museum. You didn't go traveling around to Peru or to Metropolitan Museum of Art or anything as some people might would do on a large project. The people here like Alex Morgana, for example, she did that to get these textiles. So it's sort of impressive how many images Colin could gather from the web, essentially from what's online and from what's in books in the library. That's right. The Hearst Museum now has this terrific new interface called the collection space and you can do tens of thousands of objects that way in images. So we do have another question here for Colin about his research process. Do you have any advice for someone else thinking about using museum collections for a project? Yeah. I'm not really sure in what context they mean. Well, I think it was probably Dr. Hastorf sort of answered that. It was primarily book based online. Yeah, there's great resources. A lot of these museums have visual archive collections online that is just open to the public. So yeah. But you had to look through a lot of images. Yeah. Yeah, it took time. I think the question is like what was your methods and you had to focus in on certain time periods that had both textiles and pottery because we had a sense of where we might be finding this and also what the collections, what the museums hold, what their collections are. And so you have, you know, you focus in on those areas of the, you know, those portions of the collections and then you just, I don't want to talk for you, but you can explain. Then you just looked through the pictures or something. Tell us how you actually found those Hearst pots. I didn't tell you to look at those pots. You found those pots. Yeah. The Hearst collection online is really well put together in that you can filter through time periods and even down to like a culture level. So I can just say sort by South America and then Nazca, for example, and then I'll just display all the images of Nazca artifacts. And then, yeah, just looking through them. Here's a question from me out of curiosity as an Indianist. Is there any chance some of these motifs appear in the geoglyphs and the landscape? I looked through that briefly and there was some previous work about the connection between shamanism and the geoglyphs. I didn't see any reference to these specific symbols, but one thing I read about that I thought was interesting was hypothesis for why these geoglyphs were so large and only capable of being viewed from great heights was that the shaman is in their journey is believed to leave their body and fly up sort of a magical flight up through the sky. And so maybe the fact that it can only be seen from that height was an attempt to convey the fact that it was for the shaman in their magical flight to observe these symbols. Interesting. One question about the museum collection inventory. Somebody asks if some of these observations will be linked back to the museum collections and to enhance the descriptions of the objects. That's perhaps a question for the museum. What I know is that when people write something up or publish something, it tends to go into the museum collection or archive at least. And I'm assuming that eventually objects get like those references. So if you were looking at an object, you might have a list of who has published it. I don't think we're there yet, but I would imagine that would be an ideal. So you could say, well, you know, these three or four other scholars have worked on that object. Here's a question. Have ancient build cupboard remains been found in graves? No, that's not true. In the highlands at Nino Corrine, a middle horizon, which is later post this, these images go on through the middle horizon. It's sort of a religion, a religious arc, this kind of transformation and these, these plants being important. And it goes through the middle horizon. So by 1100 AD or CE, that's when these kinds of images really sort of drop out of the of the image making of the Andean peoples. But the one place I've seen archaeological evidence was a cave in the eastern side of the Andes and the eastern side of Lake Titicaca basin. So, and again, these plants come from there. They come from the dry Yungas that sort of rocky eastern slopes or southern slopes of the southern cone of South America. So they don't come from the coast. These plants don't grow on the coast. And they don't grow on the highlands. These trees, these Colombrinas grow in the dry sort of Chaco or that sort of the Savannah like Brazil and Argentina and Chile. So those, those, these pods would probably, and maybe the branches, would probably have been brought up, traded up either up the coast or up and over the mountains to the coast. And these are all coastal images we're looking at today. But we also have highland images like the Chaveen image and also these later middle horizon images. So these would have been traded in and the Nino Corrine, the one smoking gun of the plants themselves and the branches themselves, which were all found in this cave along with some burials. But obviously it was on a major trading route. So that kind of gives us, you know, one direct piece of evidence of this particular plant being brought. It was a trade item. It was a foreign item, important foreign item that was brought in for clearly special use. That's fascinating. Well, here's another question for Colin's about his career plans. Colin, is your plan to visit these sites once shelter in place is lifted? What's your next step for your scholarship and career? I don't know yet, but I'm thinking about it. And yeah, I would love to visit these sites and the Andes in general. I've never been, but especially after studying so much about them, it'd be really cool to see in person. And was this class, was this tied to a specific class this semester? If so, which one? How did you choose this topic? I think Professor Haster, if you mentioned this at the outset, it was part of that lecture series, right? Well, he first took Indian archaeology and he'll have to ask why he did that. But and then there was a series of lectures and then he, we got together and started talking. You said something at the end of class that you wanted to work on something. So I was aware of that. And then at Berkeley, you see Berkeley, we have a senior honors thesis class, you know, sort of identifying class, if you will, that us individual students get units and they work individually with faculty. So that's the honors thesis class that he took. But it was really, you know, research project. All right. Well, looks like we're running out of time here. So I wanted to thank, thank you both. And also to mention that we have a virtual version, the Hearst Museum has a virtual version of the of the exhibit from last year that's available online now at their website. The exhibit's name is Pleasure, Poison, Prescription, Prayer, The Worlds of Mind, Altering Substances. So look in the description below this video for a link to that exhibit. And the Hearst will also be putting links to objects that Colin looked at in his talk today in the in the show description below. So thank you to Dr. Hastorf and to Colin Domnauer. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for showing us those beautiful textiles and pots. And thank you to the viewers and the listeners and to everyone who sent in questions. I'd like to invite everyone to the next Ask an Archaeologist. It's tomorrow, Wednesday at noon for it's called From the Museum, Back to the Tomb, The Virtual Rejoining of a Sarcophagus and its Burial in 26th Dynasty Sakura with Professor Rita Luccarelli from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley. Thanks, everyone.