A 3,000-Year-Old Andean Temple Ran on Psychedelics. Two Modern Retreat Centers Just Opened in Its Shadow.
New chemical analysis is confirming something archaeologists have suspected for decades: Chavín de Huántar, a 3,000-year-old pilgrimage complex high in the Peruvian Andes, ran on drug rituals. In 2016, a team led by Stanford's John Rick began excavating a newly found underground gallery that yielded what he calls "the smoking gun" — 21 bone snuff tubes. "It was crazy, we started to find all this material," says Oscar Espinoza, the Tulane Ph.D. student who ran the analysis, published in May 2025. The tubes carried residue of tobacco and seeds from the vilca tree — a mix of bufotenine, DMT, and 5-MeO-DMT that produces short, extremely intense visions.
The pattern spreads well beyond Chavín, according to a new Science feature by Andrew Lawler. At San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, home to a 400,000-object collection assembled by a local priest, ethnobotanist Constantino Torres says drug paraphernalia from the Tiahuanaco era (roughly 250-1000 C.E.) turns up in "roughly one in three graves" — among them bird-bone tubes that archaeologist Verónica Lema identified as enema syringes with "millimeter-precise dosing openings." The Wari empire, meanwhile, appears to have spiked feasting chicha beer with ground vilca seed for a subtler, longer-lasting group effect. "I might have a vilca beer with you, [even if] I'm not going to snort that stuff," says archaeologist Justin Jennings — a bonding "afterglow" he compares to what modern ayahuasca users report. A separate 2018 discovery in Bolivia, a leather bundle of snuff tools analyzed by chemist Melanie Miller, produced the first direct evidence that ayahuasca's own ingredients were being traded into the Andean highlands at all, as early as 250-550 C.E.
Not everyone is convinced how far to take this: Lema, who also worked on the Chavín lab analysis, cautions there isn't yet enough evidence to say what was actually happening in those galleries, or for whom. But the pilgrimage never really stopped — Chavín now has two psychedelic retreat centers operating in its literal shadow. "These plants are powerful tools of knowledge, allowing access to different dimensions," says Ingrid Diaz, who runs one of them. Archaeologist Matt Sayre, who still excavates at the site, says modern visitors have occasionally bribed the park's guards to sneak in after dark.