• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

This 2,000-Year-Old Peruvian Rock Art May Depict Psychedelic Music

April 5, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

A series of ancient engravings found on volcanic boulders in southern Peru might represent music that was performed during shamanic rituals involving hallucinogenic plants 2,000 years ago. Consisting of what appears to be dancing human figures surrounded by zigzagging lines and other geometric forms, the enigmatic art eludes concrete interpretation, although a new analysis suggests that these abstract shapes may depict the songs that transported participants to other dimensions during their psychedelic trips.

The pre-Columbian designs can be found at Toro Muerto, which contains one of the richest collections of rock art in South America. A desert gorge, the site is strewn with thousands of boulders, some 2,600 of which feature ancient etchings.

Advertisement

Describing the drawings in a new study, researchers explain that the artworks contain “an almost overwhelming repetition of images of dancing human figures (known as danzantes), unique in the region, and an extraordinary accumulation of geometric patterns, most often in the form of vertical zigzag, straight and sinuous lines varying in width, sometimes with accompanying dots or circles.” Previous attempts to interpret these zigzags have suggested that they may represent snakes, lightning, or water, although the study authors believe they may have an alternative meaning.

Toro Muerto danzante rock art

Examples of “danzantes” at Toro Muerto.

Image credit: Tracings: Polish-Peruvian research team, compiled by J.Z. Wołoszyn/Cambridge Archaeological Journal/2024 (CC BY 4.0)

To build their hypothesis, the researchers point out the striking similarities between the drawings at Toro Muerto and the traditional artwork of the Tukano culture in the Colombian Amazon. In the case of the latter, geometric designs have been linked to the visions induced by the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca, which has been ritually ingested by Indigenous Amazonian communities for millennia.

Anthropological analyses of these rituals have repeatedly highlighted the importance of music, with songs known as icaros being sung by shamans as a means of communicating with the gods and journeying through the spiritual cosmos. Intriguingly, studies into the significance of zigzags in Tukano artwork have revealed that “the Tukano saw in them the representations of songs which were an integral part of the ritual, having also agentive power, and constituting a medium for transfer to the mythical time of the beginning.”

In other words, within a Tukano context, these shapes depict the shamanic music that enchants ritual participants under the effects of ayahuasca, delivering them to a “parallel world” in which they are able to reconnect to their ancestral mythology. Applying this same interpretation to the artworks at Toro Muerto, the study authors suggest that “the central danzante surrounded by wavy lines is actually ‘surrounded’ by songs, which – embodying energy and power simultaneously – were the source of transfer to another world.”

Advertisement

Admitting that their theory is somewhat speculative, the researchers nonetheless conclude that these pre-Hispanic drawings “illustrated a graphically elusive sphere of culture: singing and songs.” 

Addressing the deeper meaning behind these musical depictions, the authors explain that “the cosmos constituted the space that the shaman explored in his visionary journey, while the wavy and zigzag lines could have been visualizations both of the songs taking him to that parallel reality as well as the sensation of being in that other world.”

The study is published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. ‘The Morning Show’ moves beyond #MeToo to COVID and cancel culture
  2. Russian Forces Battle to Cut Off Final Escape Route From Sievierodonetsk
  3. Decoding Ancient Languages – Modern Methods For Ancient Problems
  4. 380-Million-Year-Old Fanged Fish Found In One Of The World’s Oldest Lakes

Source Link: This 2,000-Year-Old Peruvian Rock Art May Depict Psychedelic Music

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version