Hi! Welcome everyone to Ask an
Archaeologist. I'm Nico Tripcevich, the
host of today's show. Ask an
Archaeologist is a series of live
streamed interviews co-hosted by the
Archeological Research Facility and the
Phoebe A Hearst Museum of Anthropology
at UC Berkeley. In this series, UC Berkeley
archeologists 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 that 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
gonna start our meeting today by just
introducing the situation. This is really
kind of common at UC Berkeley, where we
faculty teach 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
altered states of various
kinds, and that was associated
with an exhibit. Colin attended that and
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 Museum's material, so
that makes it particularly special today.
So I'd like to introduce Colin who just,
as Nico said, 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. Sure, okay.
Can you all see that? Mm-hmm. Okay so the
focus of my research, like Christine said,
was on the religious plant use
in the 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 Highlands from
roughly 900 to 200 BC and
contemporaneous with them was the
Paracas culture of the southern coast.
And then descendants of the
Paracas culture were Nazca, which are
well known for the Nazca lines and
geoglyphs. And they were flourishing
around 100 to 800 AD. And the Moche
culture on the Northern coast were at
similar time periods. So the focus of my
research was on this hallucinogenic
plant called Anadenathera, which is
commonly known as Vilka. 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 below them usually up the nose-
that 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
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 Chavin culture,
and you can see that decorated all over
this figure are these seed pods with the
constricted seeds and the leaves of
Anadenanthera symmetrical. This being
is sort of half human/half animal. Animal
features like the sharp teeth and clawed
feet- 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 their 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 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-seen in a
variety of different forms- but that
represents the the Vilca's 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 Andean cultures
but still exhibited no evidence of using
any hallucinogenic plants, even though
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
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 to here and
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've 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 and is a
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. In the
central image, in each side of each of
these streamers we see 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
Vilca that's being portrayed here as it
fits both those categories. And then the
last example is again of 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 is, you recall that image I
showed earlier,
is how it is consumed- blown up
the nose, see this snuffing tube. So here
this textile portrays in one image the
snuffing tube,  the transforming being, and
another hallucinogenic plant in
the Andes, and this ball and chain motif. So
that strongly suggests that this
was representing the Vilca 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. 
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 Paraca's-
descendants from them. And again we see
this ball chain motif being
portrayed here and this whole image
is kind of reminiscent on the last
slide, this streamer in the the bottom
right corner but it just kind of got blown
up onto the whole pot itself, which is
what we would expect as these cultures
(the Nazca did descend from the
Paraca's culture) and so we see them sort
of continuing this tradition of
portraying this symbol. 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
Vilca seeds.
and then this Nazca bowl is more
abstract but it does have some of the
attributes that previous scholars have
identified with Vilca. Namely, this paired
circles representing the flowers on the
vertical column of dots
representing the seed pods, and possibly
this comb-like symmetrical 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 has a
different style of portraying Vilca. 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 Vilca. And so
in all cases the we see this symbol
associated with and really attached to
the bodies of the shamans which I think
is trying to convey the fact
that this plant was sort of inseparable
from the shaman, that the shaman could
not perform their acts of
transformation without the aid of Vilca.
And the Vilca served as the vehicle
carried on the shaman through their
journeying 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 to understand and to
give a window into the very minds
and souls of these people who lived a few
thousand years ago, as we're able to say
something about the very visceral and
direct experience that they performed in
their ceremonial and religious
lives. And still today we can see
this practice not in the Andes but in
some tribes in the Amazon using this
plant. So it's existed over thousands
of years- at least four thousand years-
and was significant enough to be
portrayed and their textiles, ceramics,
and stone architecture. Perfect, thank you.
So I wanted to remind our viewers that
we are online here with Colin Domnauer
and Christine Hastorf for fifteen
more minutes and that you can post your
questions in the live chat box adjacent
to our YouTube video stream. We've
received a couple of questions- I don't
know if these are questions that
Colin or Christine would like to field,
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? Um, well some of
these textiles were used in Paraca's
culture as burial wrappings for their
dead. They would wrap them- they
mummified their dead in these
elaborately decorated textiles. 
In their world,
death was not the
end of the individual, it was more of a
transformation or gateway into the 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 and
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? Oh, well the
Paraca's textiles especially are from the
this peninsula in Southern Peru that
these fragments
would have come from. There are a few
complete ones, and these of course 
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. The people's
families or themselves would have spent
their whole lives-
first weaving and then embroidering. You
can see these or the ones on the left
especially are embroidered, which is
quite wonderful. So they could have been
acts or actions that occurred about
these individuals or they could have
been just 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 Paraca's 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 Hearst comes from
burials, so I'm guessing that that
also will be a burial shroud, um
fragment. These are all fragments, these are all
small pieces. These images
that we're looking at here are probably-
Colin, you can correct me- but
I'm imagining they're gonna be like five
inches long, maybe. Something
like that long, they probably aren't much
bigger than that.
So they're very small and there are many
of them found around the edges of these
shrouds. We have a couple more
questions that 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
yeah, and just in the archaeological
record it in general. I didn't limit
myself to the Hearst. Before you move on,
if I could add something. He did this
primarily this past spring and so his
work was really on using publications
and that's why you see these
references, so he was going and using
people who have 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
a short three/four/five/six month
project, you know, 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, you know,
Metropolitan Museum of Art or anything
as some people might do
on a large project. Or 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, you know,
essentially from what's online and from
what's in books in the library. Mm-hmm,
that's right. The Hearst Museum now has
this terrific new interface called
"collection space" and you can view tens
of thousands of objects that way. 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? 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 and online. Yeah there's great
resources. A lot of these museums have
visual archive collections online that
are just open to the public, so yeah. But
you had to look through a lot of images.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the
question is like how was your- what was
your method? And you had to focus in on
certain time periods, you know, 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 museum's hold and what
their collections are. And so you have to
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 for those pots, you
found those pots. Yeah, the Hearst
collection online is really well put
together and 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 it'll just display all the
images of Nazca artifacts and then
just looking through them. Mm-hmm. But
here's a question for me, out of
curiosity is
there any chance some of these motifs
appear in in the geoglyphs in 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 a hypothesis for why these
geoglyphs were so large and only capable
of being viewed from great heights was
that the shaman, 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 and 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. 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 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. Mm-hmm.
Here's a question: have ancient Vilca
remains been found in graves? No,
that's not true. In the highlands at Nino
Corin, a middle horizon- which is later,
post this. These images go on through the
middle horizon, it's sort of a
religious arc, this kind of
transformation and these plants
being important, and it goes through the
the middle horizon. And 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 in the
Eastern side of Lake Titicaca basin. So again, these plants come from there-
they come from the dry Yungas,
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 in the
highlands. These trees grow in the dry, sort
of the savanna-- like,
Brazil and Argentina and Chile. So those
pods and maybe the branches
would probably have been brought up,
traded either up the coast or up and
over the mountains to the coast. These
are all coastal images we're looking at
today. But we also have Highland
images like the Chavin image and also
these later middle horizon images. So
these would have been traded in and the Nino
Corin, 
the one sort of 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 for an item that was brought
in for clearly special use.
Well here's another question for Colin about his career plans. What, Colin, is your plan to
visit these sites once the 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 tied to a specific class this
semester, if so which one and how did you
choose this topic? I think Professor
Hastorf, you mentioned this at the
outset. It was part of that lecture
series. Right, well he first took Indian
Archaeology and
then there was a series of lectures and
then we got together and started
talking. You'd said something at the
end of class that you wanted to work on
something, so I was aware of that. And
then at UC Berkeley we have a
senior honors thesis class, sort
of identifying class if you will, that
individual students get units and they
work individually with faculty. So that's
the honors thesis class that he took
but it was really a research project.
All right, well looks like we're running
out of time here so I wanted to thank
you both and also to mention that
we have a virtual version- the Hearst
Museum has a virtual version 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
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 show description below. So thank you
to Dr. Hastorf and 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 and its called "From the museum
back to the to the tomb: the virtual rejoining of
a sarcophagus and its burial in the 26th
Dynasty Saqqara" with Professor Rita
Lucarelli from the Department of Near
Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley. Thanks everyone!
