According to new research, beer with hallucinogenic drugs may have helped the rulers of an ancient, pre-Incan empire in South America maintain power for 400 years.
The Wari Empire, which spanned across the highlands of modern-day Peru between 600 AD and 1000 AD, likely prospered thanks to the political allegiances forged while consuming hallucinogenic beverage, according to a study.
The research said that the potent mixture was a staple of intimate feasts that helped foster social relationships and reinforced elite positions in the Wari empire.
An archeologist is at the Quilcapampa site.
The Royal Ontario Museum has a Lisa Milosavljevic.
"Feasts for millennia were used to cement political control in the Andes," said associate professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto, who is an author of the study.
He said that the Wari innovation was to make a special kind of beer that could be linked to Wari statecraft. One that depended not on the massive festivals that would be recorded later among the Inka but instead on statecraft and a meal that was akin to a long, boozy, and delightful dinner party.
An international team of archaeologists from Canada, the US, and Peru came to this conclusion after excavating a site in Southern Peru where they discovered 16 vilca seeds.
A team of international archaeologists excavated a site.
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The authors of the study said that the seeds, which would have been ground into powder and added to molle beer, appear to have been lost.
According to National Geographic, vilca seeds are used as a hallucinogen in ancient South America to promote an intense out-of-body experience. "It is a powerful drug when used quickly, and it can lead to visions, vomiting, and blackouts," said one of the study's authors, in an email to Insider. "It's not a drug for socializing."
The Wari people are believed to have combined vilca seeds with molle beer to make the drug. "You know where you are and who you are with, but you also know that you are not in the same place as when the event began," he said.
A vilca seed was found in the Quilcapampa site.
The Royal Ontario Museum has a Lisa Milosavljevic.
A smoother, more enduring high could be enjoyed by drinking molle beer made from berries with vilca seeds. It created a politically useful sense of "communitas."
Wari leaders were able to maintain their heightened status by offering a unique hallucinatory feast, thanks to the drug-laden beers. The vilca seeds were imported from the southern coast.
The Wari formula was not copied by the Incan empire. He said that the beverage was still drunk on rare occasions in the Andes, but was replaced by the mass production of maize beer. The Wari innovations built off of, but the Inca chose a different path in regards to beer, drugs, and Feast. Why?
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