Newswise — Troy, N.Y. – A scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an anthropologist from the University at Albany teamed up to use ultra-modern chemical analysis technology at Rensselaer to analyze ancient Mayan pottery for proof of tobacco use in the ancient culture. Dmitri Zagorevski, director of the Proteomics Core in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) at Rensselaer, and Jennifer Loughmiller-Newman, a doctoral candidate at the University at Albany, have discovered the first physical evidence of tobacco in a Mayan container. Their discovery represents new evidence on the ancient use of tobacco in the Mayan culture and a new method to understand the ancient roots of tobacco use in the Americas.

Their research will appear in the journal Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, in an article titled “The detection of nicotine in a Late Mayan period flask by GCMS and LCMS methods.”

Tobacco traces were discovered inside a 1,300-year-old Mayan flask which effectively had 'tobacco' written on it in hieroglyphs.

However, the tobacco detected in the 'very small' flask may not have been used for smoking.

This Mayan flask from around 700AD has been proved to have contained tobacco, matching the hieroglyh on the front which translates roughly as 'House of his/her tobacco'

While the flask is likely to have stored tobacco leaves, the Maya also ground tobacco into a powder from which they could make a powerful alcoholic drink, snort like snuff or even use as snake repellent.

'This was very strong tobacco, much stronger than it is today,' Jennifer Loughmiller-Newman, an archaeologist at the University of Albany in New York, told MSNBC.