A recent study suggests that Germanic warriors during the Roman era may have relied on carefully dosed stimulants to enhance their courage and physical endurance in battle. Researchers identified hundreds of small, spoon-like objects, often found alongside war equipment at archaeological sites across Scandinavia, Germany, and Poland, dating between the 1st and 4th centuries CE.
These objects, ranging from 1.5 to 2.7 inches in length and featuring either a concave bowl or a flat disk, were typically attached to warriors’ belts. While they played no role in securing the belts, their proximity to weapons has led scholars to conclude that they likely served as tools for dispensing stimulant substances. The objects were consistently found in graves or marshes, areas associated with battlefields and sacrifices, further supporting the hypothesis of their use in warfare.
https://archaeologymag.com/2024/12/barbarian-warriors-used-stimulants-during-roman-era/
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Now I want to know what kinds of stimulants were available to Roman-era Germanic people!
Reaching back into history, into antiquity, we can again conclude that nothing has changed in this respect. In pre-historic times, the European flora offered a large variety of plant and fungal species with psychoactive properties, such as the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum L.), canna-bis (Cannabis sp.), ephedra (Ephedra sp.), some members of the Solanaceae family, e. g. belladonna or deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna L.), henbane (Hyoscyamus niger L.), mandragora (Mandragora officinarum L.); and also ergot (spores of the fungus Claviceps purpurea (Fr.) Tul.) and hal-lucinogenic fungi such as the liberty cap (Psilocybe semilan-ceata (Fr.) P. Kumm.) or even the fly agaric (Amanita mus-caria (L.) Lam.)4.
The history of Mediterranean civilisations is, after all, marked not only by the consumption of wine. “The ancient Greeks ate and drank opium, but the custom went nowhere beyond ancient Rome, whose users also kept this custom to themselves”5. The sentence quoted above even suggests un-equivocally that stimulants other than alcohol in antiquity were reserved for the world of Mediterranean civilisation. The barbarians living outside its borders were expected to content themselves with consuming alcoholic beverages
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/pz-2024-2017/html
It’s open access.
Hm, which of these are actually stimulants (i.e. substances that increase alertness)? The ones I know seem to be depressants, painkillers and hallucinogens, which seem less useful immediately before battle than stimulants.
The ephedrine plants would be precursors to stims but still need quite a bit of preparation as far as I know. You might be able to get ephedrine extracted from a plant but that’s not a stimulant in the way we would think of adderall or cocaine or something today, having a more similar effect to caffeine.
Both caffeine and ephedrine are stimulants.
Yes. That’s why I compared the two. However when comparing caffeine to what Id argue most people think of as stimulants like cocaine or amphetamine, they have incredibly minor effects. Its like comparing <1% thc hemp and a 90% thc concentrate imo
This always made me wonder. Why don’t we hear more about these psychoactive substances in modern day drugs. I know the nightshade family is usually poisonous as well as psychoactive but surely people have experimented with extracting/filtering these plants to get the desired effect like we extract cocaine from coca leaves or opium from poppies.
Dunno about the US but these pants are all alive and well in Europe, it’s just that the experiences they provide tend to be petty extreme (in the case of datura/belladone for example), and/or too weak or impractical compared to the modern offerings. But yeah any psychonaut worth their salt would at least know about them if not tried some of them.
I looked up ephedrine, as far as I could tell the side effects were quite heavy compared to caffein or cocaine (though cocaine makes up for it by being very addictive).
erowid.org exists.
Panzerschokolade.
TIL classical Europe had cocoa and synthetic amphetamines
Wow that guy clearly needs to lay off for a while.
