common theme of divine inebriation especially in the 
Amazon suggest that area as its ultimate source. If it 
did indeed diffuse from the tropical lowlands, its age 
would have to be at least three and a half thousand years, 
since, as mentioned above, the earliest known snufhing 
implements date to the mid-second millenium B.C. 
The fact that in addition to its numerous other psycho- 
tomimetics prehispanic Mesoamerica can now be shown 
to have shared in a wider pan-.American complex involv- 
ing the use of snuff opens up a host of new possibilities 
for culture-historical and ethnobotanical research. Ob- 
viously, multidisciplinary study of what now appears to 
have been a Mesoamerican snufling complex of substan- 
tial distribution and duration is important in and of itself. 
At the same time, it might provide answers to questions 
of external relationships, especially with South America, 
at roughly that crucial moment in time when Neolithic- 
type farming communities became transformed, by some 
as yet little understood processes, into the first great 
Mesoamerican civilization—that of the Olmec. 
