Yanghai Tombs – cannabis chosen for burial

Before prohibition, 
there was selection and preparation.

In tomb M90 at Yanghai, in the Turpan Basin of north-western China, archaeologists found 789 g of remarkably preserved cannabis in a leather basket and wooden bowl near the burial platform of a high-status man aged about forty-five.

His grave goods — including bridles, archery equipment and a kongou harp — led researchers to interpret him as a possible shaman. That identity remains an archaeological interpretation rather than a known title.

The plant material was not a random bundle of hemp.

It had been lightly pounded and contained no large stalks or branches. No obvious male flowers were present, leading the researchers to suggest that they had been excluded or possibly removed deliberately.

Chemical and genetic analysis indicated that the original plants were THC-dominant. The ancient material itself contained only very low measurable cannabinoid concentrations after centuries of degradation, so it should not be described simply as cannabis that still had “high THC”.

The evidence points instead towards material selected from plants with higher-than-average psychoactive potential.

This is why the Yanghai find matters.

It does not look like an accidental plant deposit.
It shows selection and preparation.

The quantity appears to have been gathered from several plants. The material was stripped of large stems, lightly pounded and placed deliberately within an elite burial.

Its precise purpose remains uncertain. The researchers proposed medicinal, psychoactive or divinatory use, but the burial cannot tell us which of these meanings was primary.

For LIBERA HERBA, this is one of the clearest ancient traces of deliberate cannabis selection: not modern scandal, but plant knowledge preserved inside a burial.

A plant chosen. A plant prepared.
A plant carried into death.