Patrick Swisshelm
Brenda Rocha
Paula Juarez
Jocelyn Aponte
Anasazi and Cannibalism
Cannibalism refers to a range of behaviors in which one human consumes another or parts of another. It was one of the earliest cultural practices of human beings. Although it is unclear how it started, whether it was intended for survival or whether it was done for religious ritual, some see cannibalism as a fundamental aspect to all spirituality, religion, and belief systems of the world. Others see cannibalism as only a means for survival. When it comes to the native peoples known as the Anasazi the reasons for cannibalism still remain unclear. Our debate will discuss two opposing ideas. One of them being that the Anasazi people only used cannibalism for spiritual or religious purposes. The other side of the debate will claim that the Anasazi resorted to cannibalism as a mechanism for survival, and that maybe something or some event took place to cause the Anasazi to eat each other. The following information contains both perspectives.
Cannibalism for Survival
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/anasazi.html
Riddles of the Anasazi Toward the end of the 13th century, something went terribly wrong among the Anasazi. What awful event forced the people to flee their homeland, never to return?
“…For most of the long span of time the Anasazi occupied the region now known as the Four Corners, they lived in the open or in easily accessible sites within canyons. But about 1250, many of the people began constructing settlements high in the cliffs—settlements that offered defense and protection. These villages, well preserved by the dry climate and by stone overhangs, led the Anglo explorers who found them in the 1880s to name the absent builders the Cliff Dwellers. (see picture above)
“…Toward the end of the 13th century, some cataclysmic event forced the Anasazi to flee those cliff houses and their homeland and to move south and east toward the Rio Grande and the Little Colorado River. Just what happened has been the greatest puzzle facing archaeologists who study the ancient culture. Today’s Pueblo Indians have oral histories about their peoples’ migration, but the details of these stories remain closely guarded secrets. Within the past decade, however, archaeologists have wrung from the pristine ruins new understandings about why the Anasazi left, and the picture that emerges is dark. It includes violence and warfare—even cannibalism—among the Anasazi themselves. “After about A.D. 1200, something very unpleasant happens,” says University of Colorado archaeologist Stephen Lekson. “The wheels come off.”…”
“…What drove the Anasazi to retreat to the cliffs and fortified villages? And, later, what precipitated the exodus? For a long time, experts focused on environmental explanations. Using data from tree rings, researchers know that a terrible drought seized the Southwest from 1276 to 1299; it is possible that in certain areas there was virtually no rain at all during those 23 years. In addition, the Anasazi people may have nearly deforested the region, chopping down trees for roof beams and firewood. But environmental problems don’t explain everything. Throughout the centuries, the Anasazi weathered comparable crises—a longer and more severe drought, for example, from 1130 to 1180—without heading for the cliffs or abandoning their lands.
Another theory, put forward by early explorers, speculated that nomadic raiders may have driven the Anasazi out of their homeland. But, says Lipe, “There’s simply no evidence [of nomadic tribes in this area] in the 13th century. This is one of the most thoroughly investigated regions in the world. If there were enough nomads to drive out tens of thousands of people, surely the invaders would have left plenty of archaeological evidence.”
“…So researchers have begun to look for the answer within the Anasazi themselves. According to Lekson, two critical factors that arose after 1150—the documented unpredictability of the climate and what he calls “socialization for fear”—combined to produce long-lasting violence that tore apart the Anasazi culture. In the 11th and early 12th centuries there is little archaeological evidence of true warfare, Lekson says, but there were executions. As he puts it, “There seem to have been goon squads. Things were not going well for the leaders, and the governing structure wanted to perpetuate itself by making an example of social outcasts; the leaders executed and even cannibalized them.” This practice, perpetrated by ChacoCanyon rulers, created a society-wide paranoia, according to Lekson’s theory, thus “socializing” the Anasazi people to live in constant fear. Lekson goes on to describe a grim scenario that he believes emerged during the next few hundred years. “Entire villages go after one another,” he says, “alliance against alliance. And it persists well into the Spanish period.” As late as 1700, for instance, several Hopi villages attacked the Hopi pueblo of Awatovi, setting fire to the community, killing all the adult males, capturing and possibly slaying women and children, and cannibalizing the victims. Vivid and grisly accounts of this massacre were recently gathered from elders by NorthernArizonaUniversity professor and Hopi expert Ekkehart Malotki…”
More recently, the excavators at Castle Rock recognized that some of the dead had been cannibalized. They also found evidence of scalping, decapitation and “face removing”—a practice that may have turned the victim’s head into a deboned portable trophy.
“…Suspicions of Anasazi cannibalism were first raised in the late 19th century, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that a handful of physical anthropologists, including Christy Turner of Arizona State University, really pushed the argument. Turner’s 1999 book, Man Corn, documents evidence of 76 different cases of prehistoric cannibalism in the Southwest that he uncovered during more than 30 years of research. Turner developed six criteria for detecting cannibalism from bones: the breaking of long bones to get at marrow, cut marks on bones made by stone knives, the burning of bones, “anvil abrasions” resulting from placing a bone on a rock and pounding it with another rock, the pulverizing of vertebrae, and “pot polishing”—a sheen left on bones when they are boiled for a long time in a clay vessel. To strengthen his argument, Turner refuses to attribute the damage on a given set of bones to cannibalism unless all six criteria are met…”
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http://archive.archaeology.org/9709/newsbriefs/anasazi.html
Human remains found at a twelfth-century A.D. site near Cowboy Wash in southwestern Colorado provide further evidence of cannibalism among the Anasazi (see "A Case for Cannibalism," ARCHAEOLOGY, January/February 1994). The remains of 12 people were discovered at the site, designated 5MT10010, but only five were from burials. The other seven appear to have been systematically dismembered, defleshed, their bones battered, and in some cases burned or stewed, leaving them in the same condition as bones of animals used for food. Cut marks, fractures, and other stone-tool scars were present on the bones, and the light color of some suggests stewing. Patterns of burning indicate that many were exposed to flame while still covered with flesh, which is what would be expected after cooking over a fire.
Human remains from other sites in the area were similarly treated, and three explanations have been proposed: hunger-induced cannibalism, ritual cannibalism adopted from Mesoamerica, or something else altogether. Patricia Lambert of Utah State University and Brian Billman and Banks Leonard of Soil Systems, the contract archaeology firm that excavated 5MT10010, propose that cannibalism was associated with violent conflict between Anasazi communities in the mid-1100s, contemporary with a period of drought and the collapse of the Chaco system. They note a sharp increase in evidence of cannibalism between 1130 and 1150, followed in each case by the abandonment of the site, then a decrease in the early 1200s as the climate improved.
http://anasazi.wikispaces.com/Cannibalism%3F
Some scientist think that the Anasazi may have practiced cannibalism. Evidence of this includes bones that have been boiled, burned, or cut as if to get the meat off. Archeoligist have found piles of brutalised bones at ancient Anasazi sites. Also there were samples of human feces with traces of digested human tissue.
Some suggest that the Anasazi were burning and dismembering witches, that the Anasazi did not practice cannibalism. It as believed that in order to kill a witch you had to cut out the evil heart wich could be located anywhere in the body. This could explain why the bodies are found dismembered. Other scientist believe the Anasazi sytematically killed and ate humans or that when they began expiriencing bad droughts that they would fed on humans to survive. Most of the evidence ends around the 1200's, same as the Anasazi civilization.
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/227301147_Survival_cannibalism_or_sociopolitical_intimidation?ev=prf_pub
ABSTRACT Over the past two decades, archaeologists and physical anthropologists investigating the prehistoric Anasazi culture haveidentified numerous cases of suspected cannibalism. Many scholars have suggested that starvation caused by environmental degradationinduced people to eat one another, but the growing number of cases as well as their temporal and spatial distribution challengethis conclusion. At the same time, some scholars have questioned the validity of the osteoarchaeological indicators that areused to identify cannibalism in collections of mutilated human remains. To address these concerns, this study attempts toreconstruct the behaviors that produced the Anasazi skeletal trauma by first examining ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeologicalmaterial for analogues useful for interpreting mutilated human remains and then correlating these analogues with the evidencefrom the Southwest. The patterns suggest that different behaviors are responsible for the Anasazi skeletal mutilation seenin different time periods. To explain these differences, the study employs game theoretical models that examine how changingsocial and physical contexts altered the sociopolitical strategies that Anasazi groups would likely have employed. The resultssuggest that violent mutilation and perhaps cannibalism was an intentional sociopolitical strategy of intimidation used duringPueblo II (A.D. 900–1100), while environmental changes after this period promoted resource-based warfare and the incidentalskeletal trauma associated with this behavior.
The Mancos site, of the Anasazi or Ancient Peublo Peoples culture, is located is located on Ute Mountain in Montezuma County, Colorado. The bone assemblage consisting of 2106 bone fragments was excavated in 1973 by Larry Nordby. Although the site is based on high ground, it is only 75m North East of the Mancos river, giving it access to both security and a reliable water source. Mancos 5MTUMR-2346 is held as a site of significant importance when referring to cannibalism, due to its excellent levels of preservation, owing to the lack of evidence for either pre or post depositional disturbance of the assemblage. This is imperative to reach such conclusions as it reduces the possibility of confusion in interpretations. In the 1973 excavations, a multi-room habitation was found, which had been built over the remains of an earlier dwelling. Primary interments (burials 1, 2, 4 and 12) were fairly typical, and were mostly contained within the rooms of the earliest structure. The rest of the skeletal remains were found in the room fill as well as on the floor surface, and because of this they were originally interpreted as either secondary or disturbed burials. The fragments in these ‘bone beds’ at the site could not be found to have any association or articulation, and individuals appear to be mixed together indiscriminately across the assemblage. There are many indications of possible cannibalistic consumption happening at the site. Thin long bones, most notably fibula, were found mainly intact, however, larger more robust bones, such as tibias and femurs were found highly fragmented; this points to impact being inflicted on the bones in order to reach the bone marrow, known as percussion. Percussion marks can be seen on many of the skeletal remains recovered.
Scratches on some skull fragments are likely indicative of scalping rather than attempts to crack open the skull as in other cases, due to the thickness of the skull in this case as a result of osteoporosis.
The bones themselves were bleached quite light, and this is seen frequently in cases of cannibalism, as a result of being interred without any flesh adhering to the bones. Evidence of burning is evident on a large amount of remains, and because the pattern of burning on the bones is so varied it is possible to assume that they were heated whilst some flesh was still attached. Pattern fracturing and fragmentation of long bone shafts in the assemblage are strongly evident of marrow extraction, which is common across cannibalism sites.
During the final linear pottery period, no new pits were dug, instead previously existing ones were re used to allow for the deposition of human remains, along with some fauna, ceramics, and tools made of both stone and bone. Scatters of bone fragments, some numbering up to 2000 fragments, have been recovered from these pits, and are representative of a minimum number of 500 individuals. However, with only half of the enclosure having being excavated at this point, it is hypothesised that there could be up to 1000 individuals within the entire area. In the assemblage, there is a notably high proportion of both skull fragments and leg bones compared to fragments from elsewhere in the skeletal system. Deposition occurred over a maximum of 50 years, but was probably a lot less than this. Deposit 9 was excavated in 2007, and contained a much higher density of human remains than anywhere else on site. In the assemblage recovered from deposit 9, breakage was common, especially that of long limb bones. Short shallow cut marks are typically indicative of defleshing, which is common in cases of cannibalism. There is also evidence of butchery and skinning on fragments, shown by deeper varied cutmarks. Across the skull fragments found in the deposit, cracks and fracturing occurred often. Spongy bones were also often found to have been crushed, and peeling marks were frequently seen on both vertebrae and ribs, showing a butchery technique similar to that used in the butchery of animals to separate the ribs from the vertebral column. Green bone breakageis another requisite for proof of cannibalism, and there is strong evidence of this taking place at Herxheim from the form of fragments as well as fracture outlines on bones. Skulls seem to have been the subject of particular attention, with many showing evidence of skinning following a repetitive method. In many cases, the tongue was removed, which is evident by cut and scrape marks on the lingual surface of the mandible. In some instances, the mandible was also removed from the skull following this. A distinct distribution of chew marks support the interpretation of cannibalism occurring at Herxheim; if the result of carnivore activity it would tend to have a much more random distribution across the remains than what is evident. However, because the cause of death is, at this point, undetermined, it is difficult to say whether this instance of cannibalism was a result of war, ritual activity, or a response to nutritional stress or starvation. Current interpretations view it to most likely be either a result of sacrificial ritual or revenge related to warfare, perhaps as an element of possible crisis at the end of the LBK period. This would also be supported by the evidence of increased violence at this time.