Jirzankal Cemetery
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The Jirzankal Cemetery, also called the Quman Cemetery, is a burial ground of about 2500 years ago on the west bank of the Tashkurgan River in the eastern Pamir Mountains, in the Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County of Xinjiang, China.[1] Wooden braziers from its tombs carry chemical residues of burnt cannabis. The team that analysed them called the finds "some of the earliest directly dated and scientifically verified evidence for ritual cannabis smoking".[1]
Site and excavation
The cemetery stands on terraces of an old river bed near Qushiman village, at about 3060 to 3080 metres above sea level. Its surface is marked by long strips of black and white pebbles laid out on the ground and by circular mounds with one or two rings of stones beneath them. The Xinjiang Archaeological Team of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences excavated it in two seasons, in 2013 and 2014, and divided it into four zones, of which zone B held the most tombs. Most tombs are shaft chambers under round piles of stones, with primary and secondary burials.[1]
The graves held pottery, stone tools, wooden objects, textiles, copper and iron objects and glass beads. The textiles are mainly of wool; no hemp was found among them.[1] The wooden finds include harps of the angular type, bowls and plates, mostly of birch.[1][2] Strontium isotopes in the teeth of 34 people buried in the cemetery show that 10 of them grew up elsewhere and came to the area after childhood.[3]
Dating
Twelve radiocarbon dates from nine graves, on human bone, wood, charcoal and a textile, fall between 2750 and 2340 calibrated years before present at two standard deviations. Xueye Wang and colleagues took them to place the cemetery at about 2500 years before present, in the early Iron Age.[3] One date comes from a brazier itself, from tomb M15: 2430 ± 30 radiocarbon years before present (2540 to 2355 calibrated years).[2] On the radiocarbon dates and the character of the finds, Ren and colleagues date the use of the cemetery to between 2400 and 2600 years ago, about 500 BCE.[1]
The braziers
Ten wooden braziers came from eight tombs, two each from tombs M9 and M25 and one from each of the others. They held stones with clear traces of burning.[1] They are small: the burning hollow is less than 15 centimetres across. They are made of wood rather than of the stone, pottery or bronze also found in the cemetery. Three of the four objects of juniper wood among 70 wooden finds identified from the cemetery are braziers.[2]
In 2015 Hui Shen and colleagues described the braziers as fire altars. They argued from their size and from the choice of fragrant juniper that the objects were not ordinary heaters but had a symbolic purpose. With the secondary burials, they took them as signs that fire veneration and perhaps Zoroastrian influence had reached the Tashkurgan region.[2]
Residue analysis
Ren and colleagues extracted organic material from the inner and outer surfaces of the ten braziers and from four of the stones and analysed it by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. As a reference they analysed desiccated cannabis of 790 to 520 BCE from tomb M231 of the Jiayi cemetery near Turpan, which still held cannabinol (CBN), cannabidiol (CBD) and cannabicyclol.[1]
The charred inner surfaces of nine of the ten braziers and two of the four stones carried CBN, the product of the oxidation of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). One brazier, M25:2, also carried cannabivarin (CBV). No cannabinoid was found in the brazier from tomb M23 or on the outer surface of any brazier.[1] The authors inferred that cannabis plants were burned in the braziers by laying hot stones in them.[1]
The residues held more CBN than the Jiayi reference sample and no CBD or its breakdown products. Ren and colleagues inferred from this that the plants burned at Jirzankal had produced more THC than wild cannabis typically does. They suggested several causes: cultivation with selection for stronger plants; hybridisation between separated populations as the plant was carried across the mountains; or the stresses of high altitude, which can raise THC in some plants.[1] No seeds were found in the braziers. The authors suggested that either parts of the plant other than the flowering heads were burned or the seeds had been taken out of the heads.[1]
Interpretations
Ren and colleagues read the braziers as evidence that cannabis was burned during mortuary ceremonies at the cemetery and smoked in ritual or religious practice in western China by at least 2500 years ago.[1] They use "smoking" for inhaling the fumes of burning plant material. Pipes, they note, probably reached Eurasia from the Americas and are not clearly attested in Central Asia before the modern era.[1]
They compared the finds with the hemp-burning set of the Pazyryk burials in the Altai and with the account by Herodotus of Scythians throwing hemp on hot stones in a small tent. In Herodotus the smoke was a cleansing after a burial. Ren and colleagues held that at Jirzankal and Pazyryk the burning took place during the burial. They suggested that it served a different rite, perhaps one aimed at communicating with the divine or with the dead.[1]
The tombs with braziers held people of varied social standing. Of the tombs of people who grew up elsewhere, only one held a brazier, which the authors suggested might mean that burning cannabis was a local funeral custom. From the difference between Pazyryk and Jirzankal they suggested that ritual smoking gradually spread from an elite to common people in the eastern Pamirs.[1] They also reported that the excavators read perforated skulls and cut and broken bones in some graves as signs of human sacrifice, a reading they held to need further research.[1]
The Pamirs linked the peoples of what are now China, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Glass beads and angular harps of western Asian type were found in the cemetery together with silk from eastern China. The authors placed the finds in a period of exchange across the plateau before the Han state set up taxes and military posts on the northern routes of the Silk Road in the last century BCE.[1]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 Ren, Meng; Tang, Zihua; Wu, Xinhua; Spengler, Robert; Jiang, Hongen; Yang, Yimin; Boivin, Nicole (2019). "The origins of cannabis smoking: chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs". Science Advances. 5 (6) eaaw1391. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaw1391.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Shen, Hui; Wu, Xinhua; Tang, Zihua; Zhou, Xinying; Sun, Nan; Li, Xiaoqiang (2015). "Wood usage and fire veneration in the Pamir, Xinjiang, 2500 yr BP". PLOS ONE. 10 (8) e0134847. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0134847.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Wang, Xueye; Tang, Zihua; Wu, Jing; Wu, Xinhua; Wu, Yiqun; Zhou, Xinying (2016). "Strontium isotope evidence for a highly mobile population on the Pamir Plateau 2500 years ago". Scientific Reports. 6 35162. doi:10.1038/srep35162.