What’s the story with the cocaine mummies? Researchers have evidently established the presence of cocaine in mummified corpses in Egypt and Sudan that date back to before Columbus landed in America. Since cocaine is only known to have been cultivated in South America at that time, some people speculate that there may have been an ancient transatlantic trade route. How about it, Cecil? Do all the archaeology textbooks in the world need to be rewritten?
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The controversy began in the early 1990s, when a team of German researchers published a couple short papers claiming they’d found significant traces of cocaine, nicotine, and “hashish” in several Egyptian mummies, some of which were more than 3,000 years old. The papers offered an insight into the personal habits of the idle rich in ancient times (conclusion: things haven’t changed much in 3,000 years). Just one problem: in pre-Columbian times, so far as we know, tobacco and coca grew only in the Americas, and there was no trade between the Old World and New.
As one might expect, the papers were greeted with disbelief, as if they’d announced that in the days of the pharaohs the sun rose in the west but hadn’t acknowledged anything odd about it. Although the criticisms were politely phrased, the subtext was unmistakable: Listen, you morons, if you’re going to present results that fly in the face of everything we know about ancient trade, botany, etc, you’re going to need more than seven paragraphs and a chart to convince us. Among the possibilities suggested: (1) The samples were contaminated. (2) The mummies were fakes. (3) The analytical techniques were faulty. (4) Related Old World alkaloids might have been misidentified.
The TV show wasn’t a bad piece of work. (You can read the script at www.uiowa.edu/-anthro/webcourse/lost/coctrans.htm.) It gave ample airtime to the skeptics but overall left the impression that Balabanova, Parsche, et al might be on to something, making a better case for their work than they had bothered to make themselves. But it was just TV. It’s not the kind of thing scientists normally respond to, and they haven’t.
