~ BOTANICAL MUSEUM LEAFLETS 
“a HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
CampripGr, Massacnuserrs, Jury 31, 1974 Vor. 24, No. 1 
ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE 
FOR SNUFFING IN PREHISPANIC MEXICO 
BY 
Perer T. Furst 
The various hallucinogenic or psychoactive plants the 
extensive religious and divinatory use of which by Mexi- 
‘an Indians both fascinated and appalled the Spanish 
colonial clergy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- 
ries were smoked, chewed, sucked, brewed or macerated 
into beverages and otherwise ingested in liquid, solid or 
incinerated form. ‘Tobacco, most commonly smoked, 
was also ground into a fine green powder that was not 
taken internally but was rather applied externally to the 
patient's body in shamanistie curing practices. 
All these customary uses of ‘‘mind-altering’’ sub- 
stances are well described for both prehispanic and post- 
Conquest Mexico by such writers as Sahagin, Duran, 
Hernandez and, somewhat later, Jacinto de la Serna and 
Ruiz de Alarcon. In contrast, there is no mention what- 
ever of hallucinogenic snuffs, taken through tubes or 
through ‘‘nose pipes’’, a common practice in the West 
Indies and in Central and South America. Since these 
and other chroniclers of indigenous practices and beliefs 
were usually careful observers, and since the Church was 
engaged in a vigorous—albeit ultimately unsuccessful— 
campaign to discover and suppress the indigenous use of 
intoxicants of all forms, we must assume that, trade and 
[1] 
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