Science magazine reports on the Dutch discovery of, basically, Roman-era drugs hidden inside a hollow bone. The black henbane seeds could have been used to treat ailments (or to bring on visions) out on the edges of the empire:
In a paper published today in the journal Antiquity, researchers report finding a cache of Roman-era black henbane from the first century C.E. hidden within the hollows of a goat or sheep bone from the Netherlands. Medical uses of the plant are described in Roman texts, but the find shows its powers were known even on the far fringes of the empire.
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Archaeologists almost missed the unique find. While sorting and measuring more than 86,000 animal bones found at a 2000-year-old farmstead near what is today the Dutch city of Utrecht, archaeozoologist Maaike Groot of the Free University of Berlin didn’t notice that one of these bones was sealed at one end by a small birch tar plug.
Her colleague Martijn van Haasteren, an archaeozoologist now working for the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, also initially missed the plug while cleaning the bones back at his lab. When he accidentally dislodged it, hundreds of tiny black specks spilled out.
Colleagues identified them as the seeds of black henbane, a toxic plant that thrives in the kind of disturbed soil often found on the margins of human settlements. The sticky birch tar plug and waterlogged soil had preserved the bone container and its contents over the centuries. “I don’t think we realized how exciting the find was at the time,” Groot says. “It really is quite unique.”
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The bone container, about the diameter of a pinkie finger inside, tells a story of human use. “To see it in a bone with a plug I found really interesting,” Totelin says. “It’s quite clearly preserved for its medicinal purposes.” And the container appears to have been well-used. “Some parts of the bone were more polished than others, as though it had been handled a lot,” van Haasteren notes.
Ancient Roman authors were clearly familiar with the plant. Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, and others wrote about black henbane, along with its closely related but less potent relatives, white and yellow henbane. These plants—in the form of ointments, potions, or burning smoke—were prescribed for everything from earaches and toothaches to flatulence and “pains of the womb.” Ancient scholars also warned against taking too much because of the potential for hallucinogenic effects; Pliny counseled physicians to avoid it entirely.
The bone and its contents were found in a pit with several unbroken pots, a basket or fish trap woven from hazel branches, and part of a horse’s skeleton. Groot says the artifacts nearby suggest some sort of purposeful deposit or ritual. Because the bone wasn’t burned, researchers ruled out the possibility that it was a smoking pipe—and after some consideration, they decided against experimenting to make sure. “The poison is so strong,” van Haasteren says. “When you think about how much was in there, your imagination really goes wild.”