shaped nose pipe. Both of these figurines belong to the 
larger West Mexican shaft-and-chamber tomb art com- 
plex and can, therefore, be dated between 100 B.C. and 
A.D. 100-200. 
In addition to the effigies, we were able to identify, 
in several collections, a number of pottery snuffers or 
nose pipes from West Mexico that closely resemble the 
well known Costa Rican snuffing pipes illustrated by 
Weassén in several publications. [specially interesting is 
a red-slipped snuffer with bifurcated stems, one for each 
nostril, from the Ixtlin del Rio area of southern Nayarit 
(Plate IIL). The Ixtlin snuffer is actually a convention- 
alized bird effigy, with nubs at the side of the bowl to 
indicate wings, and a projection at the front for the head 
or beak. Such abbreviated bird symbolism is common on 
Costa Rican pottery snuffers as well. That this is hardly 
fortuitous was recognized by Wassén: birds and_ bird 
spirits are widely connected with the ecstatic trance ex- 
perience and with shamanism. 
For atime, these West Mexican specimens seemed to 
be all that there was. Snuffing, therefore, appeared to be 
an isolated phenomenon in time and space, associated with 
the shaft-and-chamber tomb cultures of the West Coast. 
Their funerary art indicates that these same cultures also 
employed the peyote cactus and, possibly, mushrooms. 
The close similarity of the West Coast pottery snuffers 
to those of Central America, and their restricted distri- 
bution close to the Pacific coast, suggested a somewhat 
short-lived trait, introduced possibly from a southerly 
source, that eventually failed to take hold alongside es- 
tablished cults involving such well known indigenous 
Mexican hallucinogens as peyote and the sacred mush- 
rooms. 
However, West Coast snuffing was not to remain the 
isolated and short-lived phenomenon that it appeared at 
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