litos, have served as snuff tablets (Furst, 1968: 162). At 
least some of the Olmec ‘‘spoons’’ seemed to represent 
long-tailed birds in flight, seen in profile. In any event, 
like some South American snuff tablets, certain Olmec 
jade spoons are decorated with bird-jaguar motifs, a com- 
mon symbolic theme in South American ritual intoxi- 
‘ation. 
At the time, this was still highly speculative. No 
direct evidence existed to show that the Olmec had used 
snuff or other hallucinogens; for that matter, there was 
no proof that the ritual use of psychoactive substances 
in Mesoamerica was any older than the oldest of the so- 
‘alled mushroom stones, 1.e., from the end of the Mid- 
dle to the Late Formative. All that could be said was 
that it would be surprising if the Olmec had used no 
hallucinogens, considering what was already known of 
the antiquity and wide distribution of the hallucinogenic 
phenomenon in the New World. ‘To mention only snuff 
ing: the earliest known archaeological snuffing imple- 
ments are a whalebone tablet and associated birdbone 
snuffing tube which Junius Bird of the American Mu- 
seum of Natural History excavated at Huaca Prieta, 
Peru. These are dated at ca. 1500-1700 B.C. The evi- 
dence was thus conclusive fora time depth of some 8,500 
years for the use of, hallucinogenic snuffs in South 
America. 
The first evidence that snuffing was in fact known at 
one time also in Mesoamerica came to my attention in 
the form of a hollow, redware effigy figurine from Co- 
lima, representing a seated man with a horn on his head 
and a small, gourd-shaped nose pipe held to one nostril 
(Plate 1). Subsequently, [ was to come across a second, 
considerably larger, Colima effigy (Plate I), of burnished 
brown clay, sculpturally far more sophisticated, again 
depicting a manin the act of snuffing from a gourd- 
[6 ] 
