What Coca Means in Peru

[Judi Lynn]

Coca has a long history of use in Peru: for sacred ritual, economic productivity, courtship and celebration of life events.



Andean ritual with coca leaves via Wikimedia Commons
By: Livia Gershon January 9, 2022 3 minutes

In the U.S., we mostly know coca as the raw material for cocaine, but coca has a lengthy history aside from illicit drugs. In South America, where it originated, it has been a significant part of daily life, and ritual activity, for thousands of years, as archaeologists Lidio M Valdez, Juan Taboada, and J. Ernesto Valdez explain.

Archaeologists have found evidence that people were chewing coca leaves along the Pacific coast of what’s now Peru before 5000 BCE, Valdez, Taboada, and Valdez report. It’s not clear how early people began transporting coca to other parts of what’s now Peru, but a trade route may have brought the leaves to the Andes as early as 700 BCE.

At the time they were writing in 2015, the authors had recently discovered the earliest proof of coca in Peru’s highlands—leaves wedged between two metal pins as part of a burial offering around 550 CE.

Coca is vulnerable to frost and can’t grow in the highlands, a fact which may have helped shape the region’s empires. There’s evidence that the Wari Empire, which preceded the Inca, may have colonized a lowland valley to cultivate coca there.

More:
https://daily.jstor.org/what-coca-means-in-peru/