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If you were setting sail for foreign lands, perhaps never to return home, what would you take with you? The first settlers of the Caribbean Islands, when faced with this decision, chose to take their bongs, which they passed down as heirlooms to future generations.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have dated the ceramic inhaling bowls and snuffing tubes found on the island of Carriacou to several centuries before the island was first inhabited—meaning the bowls were brought by settlers from South America or neighboring islands, and were already heirlooms when they made the trip.

To find out just how old the bowls were, the researchers used luminescence dating, a technique that measures the amount of light energy trapped in crystals, which increases with time. The bowls found on Carriacou were dated to roughly 400 B.C., and were found amidst much younger deposits, a sign that they were valued possessions passed down from generation to generation. They were used for consuming hallucinogenic substances, probably the drug cohoba, and played a part in important rituals.

Drug paraphernalia from that period often took on the shapes of animals—birds for their flight, turtles for their ability to inhabit both land and water, and bats, which were believed to be possessed by the souls of ancestors who would emerge at night to eat guava fruit and sleep with unsuspecting women.

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Image: flickr/ urbanshoregirl

October 21st, 2008 Tags: archaeology, drugs
by Nina Bai in Where We Came From & Where We're Going | 2 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >