While in a trance, ancient Native Americans sat around a fire in an enclosed tent, not speaking, stripped to the skin, but sweating away spiritual and physical evil in a holy ceremony.

This replica of a Sweat Lodge of American Indian’s religion is only a few objects people will be able to see at the new exhibit in the Anthropology Museum.

“Spiritual Healing in Los Angeles” features “botanicas” of Latin America, Afro-Caribbean, and indigenous American ideas about health and healing practices.

“Spiritual Healing in Los Angeles was just the title I thought would cover all the dimensions of healing practices in Los Angeles, except for Asia because it was too much,” Blair Gibson, director of the museum, said.

“The botanicas reflect and represent people who are inherent to religions that are not all strictly Catholic,” he said.

Artifacts featured in the exhibit were chosen and displays were created by anthropology students from the last semester.

“The students actually did real ethnic graphic field work; they worked very hard on it,” Gibson said.

“They went out to numbers of local Pow Wows, talked to surviving of elders of the American Indians, and based on that experience created a miniature sweat lodge,” he said.

Gibson also said that students may expect to see voodoo artifacts, different representations of saints, different gods and different types of medicine.

This museum will benefit the students by making them “aware (of) what an amazing place Los Angeles is,” Gibson said.

“They don’t realize the important role played by the botanicas as a kind of alternative to Western medicine,” Gibson said.

Lee Gonzalez, assistant to Gibson, said that from this museum people will become aware of a “holistic approach to healing yourself, not so much relying on aspirins and medicine.”

A lecture about the aboriginal healing practices, “Landscape in Heaven” with featured speaker is Ysamur Flores-Pena will take place tomorrow at 1 p.m in the Campus Theatre.