Cannabis in a Siberian Tomb: The Oldest Evidence of Its Use

A princely tomb with spectacular sacrifices

At the center of the Tunnug royal mound, excavators uncovered four wooden funerary structures containing several coffins hollowed from tree trunks. Above these constructions lay the skeletons of horses, arranged according to a Scythian tradition known as the 'spectral procession'. This rite combined animal sacrifices and, in all likelihood, human ones.

This type of burial was reserved for elites. It reflects the wealth of the nomadic horse-riding societies that occupied the steppes of Central Asia and Siberia during the first millennium BCE. Their princely tombs, often covered by burial mounds, have yielded grave goods and rituals of great complexity, whose study sheds light on the social hierarchy and beliefs of these peoples.

Seeds and hair that tell a story

The archaeologists discovered more than a thousand whole seeds of Cannabis ruderalis, a wild form of cannabis, along with about five hundred partial seeds. Radiocarbon-dated to between 800 and 760 BCE, they fix the chronology of the burial.

Samples of human hair taken from the tomb also revealed signals corresponding to cannabinol and THC, the two psychoactive compounds of the plant. However, the analyses cannot tell how much of the substance was consumed, nor in what form it was taken.

A use possibly tied to the ritual

Gino Caspari, archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, and first author of the study, stresses that the molecular traces in the hair and the seeds come from the same burial. In his view, this indicates that cannabis was used for its intoxicating properties.

In this context of sacrifice, the researchers suggest that the plant may have been used to calm the people destined to be incorporated into the ritual. This is an interpretation: the sources do not allow it to be established with certainty, and other ritual or social uses remain possible.

Evidence that pushes back the known date

Until now, the Greek historian Herodotus, in the 5th century BCE, described Scythian nomads inhaling the fumes of burned hemp seeds. Traces of use discovered in a Chinese cemetery dating to about 500 BCE had been considered the oldest.

The new study pushes this limit back by roughly three centuries and confirms the antiquity of funerary cannabis use in Central Asia. Cannabis, probably originating in Asia, was already cultivated for its fibers, textiles and oil-rich seeds long before this period. The researchers now plan to sequence certain plant samples in order to trace the history of the plant's domestication and spread, work that could clarify the route this crop took across Eurasia.