chotria, a species of which in South America has now been found 
to have N,N-dimethyltryptamine. 
Psychotria occurs up as far as Vera Cruz and it is possible that 
other species have this principle. Furthermore, Holmstedt be- 
lieves that he has found this same chemical in our species of 
Justicia which is added to Viro/a snuff by the Waikas. Other 
species of Justicia occur as far north as Vera Cruz and may pos- 
sibly also have this chemical constituent. 
While the botanical sources for hallucinogenic snuff 
in Mesoamerica must, for the present, remain conjectur- 
al, the evidence for snuffing in archaeological art is, as 
we shall see, beyond question. Moreover, on the earliest 
level of the proposed Mesoamerican snuffiing complex— 
that is, the Early to’ Middle Formative—the evidence 
points persuasively southward, at least to Central Ameri- 
‘a, if not actually to northwestern South America. 
We owe much of our knowledge of Central and South 
American snufting paraphernalia—prehistoric as well as 
recent—to Wassén’s several studies, and I would here 
like to acknowledge my own debt to our Swedish col- 
league in this area of research. It was a paper by Was- 
sén, published in 1967, that first set me on the track of 
a possible snuffing complex in Mexico. Specifically, my 
attention was drawn to the so called Brazilian “tos, small 
effigy stone carvings, usually bird-like, with carved, shal- 
low, oval or circular depressions that made them appear 
like receptacles. A number of these were found in the 
last century in the shell middens of Santa Catarina, 
Brazil. Wassén thought it likely that these bird-efhgy 
litos might have served as tablets for hallucinogenic 
snuff, rather like the archaeological wooden snuff tablets 
found in the Chilean and Peruvian desert, or more re- 
cent snuff tablets from Amazonia. 
Subsequently, I raised the question of the use of hal- 
lucinogens by the Olmec, suggesting that the well known 
jade artifacts called ‘*spoons’’, might, like the Brazilian 
[ 5 | 
