Yopo Snuff Tray and Tube

The kit is small and consistent. A flat tray, carved from hardwood or from bone, usually rectangular or oval, often with a carved figure at one end and a shallow field where powder is laid out. A tube, made from a hollow bird bone or a length of cane, sometimes with a small cup or bead at one end. Frequently a spatula or a small pestle for working the powder, and a container to keep it in.

The tubes come in two significantly different forms and the difference is not a technicality. A single straight tube lets a person take snuff themselves. A longer tube, often Y-shaped or paired, lets one person blow the powder into another person's nostrils, which requires two people, an agreement between them, and a considerable amount of force. Which form predominates in an assemblage tells you something about how the practice was organised.

The powder itself is prepared from the seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina, roasted, ground and mixed with an alkaline ash or lime. The tray is where that preparation is finished and where the dose is laid out, so it functions as a work surface as much as a container, which is why the carving is concentrated at the ends and edges.

Trays are small, generally under a forearm in length, and flat enough to travel. Together with the tube and the pouch they form a kit that one person can carry, which is how it reached so far from where the seeds grow.

The paradox of this complex is that the best-preserved material comes from the wrong place. Wood and bone do not survive in the Amazon; the humidity destroys them within a generation or two. They survive extremely well in the hyper-arid oases of the south-central Andes, and above all at San Pedro de Atacama, where burials have yielded snuff trays, tubes, spatulas, pouches and their contents in very large numbers and in good condition.

Constantino Manuel Torres and David Repke assembled that record alongside the living ethnography of the Orinoco basin and the northwest Amazon, where the practice continues. The result is a picture that neither body of evidence gives on its own: a material tradition with real depth in time, carved in styles that can be sequenced, and distributed across ecological zones that had no business sharing a technology unless people and goods were moving between them.

That last point is the one worth taking away. A snuff tray found in a desert cemetery, made of a wood from elsewhere, decorated in an identifiable regional style, and used for a preparation from a lowland tree, is direct evidence of long-distance connection. The forest and the coast and the highlands were not separate worlds, and this small object is among the clearer proofs of it.