Vilca, also called willka or cebil, is Anadenanthera colubrina, a tree known as vilca in Peru, Bolivia and Chile and as cebil in Argentina, growing mainly in seasonally dry forests (Lema, 2024). It is the southern relative of yopo, and the two names are often mixed up.
Most of the archaeology quoted as “ancient DMT” concerns vilca snuff. At Chavín de Huántar in Peru, bone tubes from a sealed gallery dated to about 800–350 BCE carried traces of bufotenine, nicotine and, in one artifact, DMT, consistent with vilca and wild tobacco (Rick et al., 2025). In southwestern Bolivia, a ritual bundle about 1,000 years old held a pouch with traces of DMT, bufotenine, harmine and cocaine (Miller et al., 2019).
The chemistry needs care. In these papers vilca’s marker is bufotenine, not DMT; the Bolivian bundle’s authors describe bufotenine as its primary tryptamine (Miller et al., 2019). So a find called “ancient DMT” is often mostly a bufotenine find. Residue chemistry shows which compounds touched an object, not who used it, how or how often. Vilca is still a major ritual plant in the Andes today, which the 2024 review documents.
Sources
- Lema, 2024, Plants: contemporary uses of vilca
- Rick et al., 2025, PNAS: ritual use of psychoactive plants at Chavín de Huántar
- Miller et al., 2019, PNAS: 1,000-year-old ritual bundle
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