Transdisciplinary Study Sheds New Light on History of the Mayan People

Whatever might be the truth about the apocalyptic eschatology of the Mayan calendar and its endtimes forecast for the Gregorian 2012, one thing is clear, it seems: The Mayan people knew about extracting pleasures from their existential present, as they appear to have used tobacco. That the peoples of Mesoamerica used nicotine could be surmised from other evidence, but a study published on January 12, 2012, in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell, provided material evidence of tobacco use by the ancient Maya.

As if taking a cue from speakers at a digital humanities session at the recent AHA annual meeting—who exhorted historians to interact with practitioners of other disciplines—the study’s authors, Jennifer A. Loughmiller-Newman, an anthropology PhD student at the University of Albany, and Dmitri Zagorevski, director of the proteomics core in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, used gas and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry to detect the presence of nicotine in a codex-style flask (see image). They thus provided, for the first time, physical evidence for the use of tobacco by the Mayan people in the late classical period (600 to 900 CE). The spectrometric analysis also allowed the two researchers to conclude that the tobacco residues had not been subjected to any thermal effects, and thus that the container did not serve as an ash tray and that the tobacco was not “smoked.”...