Catherine
Dold
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American Cannibal
Discover
Life in the southwestern corner of Colorado can
be difficult in the best of times. Rainfall is scarce, making growth hard
even for the scrubby sagebrush and tough pinon and juniper trees that dot
the arid land. In summer the heat is oppressive on the flatlands, and only
slightly more tolerable on top of the flat, high mesas that jut above the
horizon. Winter is not much better.
Chapin Mesa, one of the largest features in the area, dominates
the landscape and the imagination. Tucked away within its hidden canyons are
the famous cliff dwellings built long ago by the Anasazi Indians. Sheltered
by enormous natural overhangs, each village is a dense cluster of
brick-walled rooms stacked two or three stories high, fronted by sunny
plazas. Tiny windows in some rooms yield glimpses of paintings on inside
walls; subterranean gathering rooms -- called kivas -- feature benches and
elaborate ventilation systems. Everything is constructed
of reddish-gold
sandstone, which seems to glow in the unforgiving southwestern sun.
Magnificent as these homes were, however, the Anasazi lived in them for
fewer than a hundred years. For some unknown reason, they completely
abandoned the area around A.D. 1300. Today, most of the cliff dwellings are
preserved in Mesa Verde National Park, and every summer throngs of visitors
ponder the mysterious departure of the Anasazi. Drought, warfare, and the
harsh environment are all cited as possible explanations.
But another, deeper mystery lies just a dozen or so miles west of Mesa
Verde, in
an area known as Cowboy Wash, a broad, flat floodplain in the
shadow of Sleeping
Ute Mountain. A century and a half before the abandonment
of Mesa Verde, Cowboy Wash was home to another group of people, probably
Anasazi as well. Recently, archeologists discovered several piles of human bones
at the site. These bones, they say, show clear evidence of cannibalism.
What's more, they maintain that this find does not represent an isolated
incident. In the last few years, at least 30 nearby digs have yielded similar evidence
of humans eating humans. Some archeologists speculate, naturally, that only
people forced to desperate measures by starvation in this harsh environment
would resort to cannibalism. The excavators of Cowboy Wash, however, propose
a new theory. The cannibalism that occurred there, they say, was an act of
prehistoric terrorism.
Traditionally, the Anasazi have been portrayed as peaceful farmers who
quietly tended their corn and bean crops. Archeological records indicate
that they occupied the Four Corners area -- the juncture of present-day
Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico -- from the beginning of the first
millennium to around 1300. During that time they developed complex
societies, farming methods, and architectural styles, culminating in life
among the cliff dwellings. But recent work hints that the Anasazi world was
far more turbulent than suspected.
The clues come from an archeological dig conducted by Soil Systems, Inc., a
private consulting firm in Phoenix, Arizona. Under contract to the Ute
Mountain Ute Tribe, SSI excavated several ruins in the Cowboy Wash area so
the tribe could relocate any ancient human remains before the launch of a
new irrigation project. The site where the bones were found, a dwelling
known as 5mt10010, is believed to have been occupied between the years 1125
and 1150. It includes three pit structures, the roofed, semi-sunken rooms
typical of Anasazi homes at that time, as well as other rooms and trash
heaps known as middens. Some 15 to 20 people, divided into three households,
probably lived there.
The telltale bones were found scattered about the floors of two of the pit
structures. In one, known as Feature 3, SSI archeologists found more than
1,100 bones and bone fragments, including shoulder blades, skulls,
vertebrae, ribs, arm bones, hand and foot bones, and teeth. Nearly all were
broken. Most were found in a heap at the bottom of an air shaft. In the
other pit structure, Feature 13, the bones were found scattered on the floor
and in side chambers.
"This was in no way a burial," says Patricia Lambert, a bioarcheologist
from Utah State University in Logan who was hired to analyze the bones.
"There was
no reverence for these remains." Lambert's job was to try to reconstruct
complete skeletons from the fractured pieces and decipher the clues left
behind. "It was a big puzzle," she says. "The elements were all mixed
together and broken." Many bones, particularly large leg bones, were
missing. Eventually Lambert established that at least five people had been
disposed of at Feature 3 -- three adult males, one adult female, and an
11-year-old child. Two children were found in the other pit structure, one a
7 year-old, the other 14.
Evidence of trauma was not hard to find. Most of the bones were broken, and
many looked scraped and scorched. The marks looked like those left on the
bones of large game animals after butchering. According to many
archeologists, the presence of such marks on human bones is a clear
indication of cannibalism. Someone who is planning to eat a human body part,
the theory goes, would naturally prepare it in the same manner as he would
an elk or a deer. And that is exactly what Lambert found.
"I found cut marks at muscle attachment sites, such as where the femur is
attached
to the hipbone," she says. "It's pretty clear they were
disarticulating the body, cutting tendons and soft tissues that connect
various parts." The cut marks occur when cutting tools slip and strike bone
instead of tissue, she explains, and they cannot be mistaken for the gnawing
marks an animal might leave. The relatively pristine condition of the bones
is yet another clue; If the flesh had been left to rot away rather than
being deliberately removed, says Lambert, the bones would be discolored and
pitted instead of white, smooth, and dense. And some bones look as through
they were broken open so the nutritious marrow could be extracted. They bear
the complex fractures that occur in living bone -- not the simple, smooth
fractures of decaying bone. Moreover, they show flake scars, the marks that
are left when a hammering tool chips bone.
Perhaps most disturbing was the evidence of burning and cooking -- even a
mere summation of it, 850 years after the fact, is enough to make one
queasy: some
bones appear to have been browned by heat exposure when they were still
covered with flesh, and the skulls of both children in Feature 13 were
obviously burned. "The burning clearly happened while the head was intact,"
says Lambert. "The back of the cranial vault was down around the coals, and
the flames licked up and browned the side and blackened the back. Sometime
later the head was taken apart -- we found the pieces
in two separate piles.
They were putting the head on the fire. They were not incinerating it, but
they did put it on there long enough to have cooked the brains.
"I can't say that they were eating these people, but they were certainly
processing them in a way that suggests they were," says Lambert.
The victims and alleged perpetrators also left behind a few other clues. In
one pit structure, archeologists found a set of tools, including two axes,
that might have been used to butcher the bodies. "Sort of like leaving a
calling card"' muses archeologist Brian Billman, project director for SSI.
Not only were cooking pots, ladies, and lids left behind, but so were tools,
beads, and some jewelry. Leaving behind such valuables suggests that the
sites were suddenly abandoned, says Billman, and sediment deposits on top of
the bones and pots provide clues that the homes remained vacant.
Furthermore, three other sites in the immediate area yielded the same type
of remains, from the same time period: human bones irreverently scattered
about deserted homes.
The evidence, Billman concludes, all points to an outbreak of cannibalism
designed
to terrorize and intimidate a group of people, most likely some
foreigners who posed competition for scarce food resources. "It was a time
of severe drought, as well as social and political upheaval," he says.
"People were moving into new areas and mixing up alliances." Billman
believes that people from about 60 miles south moved into Cowboy Wash and
replaced the local community, as evidenced by several pots found there
bearing the style of a more southern culture. But the immigrants' arrival
apparently did not sit well with the local Anasazi.
"We think that certain groups in the Mesa Verde area, out of desperation,
then turned to a strategy of warfare and cannibalism. One or more of the
communities in this area decided on this as a political strategy, to push
the new groups back out of the area and give themselves more resources.
Plus, the message would be delivered to other communities that `You'd better
not mess with us.' It would so terrorize people that they would never think
of messing with you." The carnage was indeed extensive. Billman estimate that
between 60 and 100 people lived in the nine dwellings at Cowboy Wash. In the
four dwellings he has excavated so far, he turned up the remains of 24
people.
Billman says two distinct patterns of human remains at several suspected
cannibalism sites support his terrorism theory. In one pattern, which was
also observed at Cowboy Wash, human remains were scattered on floors, and
the dwellings abandoned soon after. In the other, remains were not left
lying about but were dumped into pits or unused rooms. Billman thinks the
first pattern occurred in victims' home, where they were cut up and
consumed. The second pattern occurred in sites belonging to the
perpetrators, who continued to use their homes after processing the bodies.
"At the Mancos Canyon site, which is only 12 miles from Cowboy Wash, 30 to
40 people were found in trash dumps. They might have been people who were
taken to that village and consumed there." Likewise, the meat-laden leg
bones missing from Cowboy Wash were probably carried off be eaten later at
secondary sites. At any rate, that is what Billman suspects, based on how
hunters typically handle large game.
At least half the suspected incidents of cannibalism at the sites he reviewed
occurred around 1150. "When call this an `outbreak' of cannibalism. It
looks like before this there was a very low level of cannibalism, then with
this severe drought and social turmoil a few groups turned to terroristic
violence." By the early 1200s, he notes, climatic conditions were back to
normal and there were very few incidents of cannibalism. Around this time,
too, the inhabitants of Mesa Verde moved from the pueblos on top of the mesa
to the cliff dwellings in the sheltered cliff alcoves, a move some say was
taken because the cliff dwellings were more easily defended.
Researchers have proposed other motivations for the alleged cannibalism, but
they just don't fit the scenario, he adds. If the perpetrators had been
goaded by hunger, he says, they would have been more likely to leave the
area and search for food rather than resort to such drastic measures.
Hunger-induced cannibalism typically occurs in groups that are trapped, such
as the Donner party, which was caught by a snowstorm in the Sierra Nevada in
1846. The people of the Cowboy Wash site had no such constraints. And
besides, most of the victims appear to have been done away with in one fell
swoop -- not a prudent use of resources if you're starving.
Christy Turner, a bioarcheologist at Arizona State University in Tempe,
agrees with the terrorism theory but thinks the explanation for it is even
more complex. Anasazi culture bears signs of trade with Mexico, such as
copper bells, macaws, and corn. During this time central Mexico was in
social turmoil, says Turner, and hundreds of cults sprang up. Some members
may have fled north, bringing not only distinctive trade goods but, possibly, flesh-eating rituals too. Plenty of evidence for such rituals
occurs in historical accounts and in the archeological record of central
Mexico, says Turner, and the practice was often used to intimidate
neighboring tribes. Another possibly is that cannibalism might have
developed independently -- but for similar reasons -- in the Four Corners
region. It may, for example, be linked to a strategy for social control by
inhabitants of Chaco Canyon, a New Mexico community of several thousand
Anasazi that lay some 80 miles south of Mesa Verde. Chaco Canyon was a hub
of Anasazi culture, and many scholars think it had great political and social
influence over outlying communities.
The details of that particular scenario are sketchy, and Turner, who is at
work on a book about the subject, won't elaborate. But Billman doesn't think
the evidence supports that theory. He contends that the major outbreak of
cannibalism actually occurred after Chaco Canyon was abandoned in the 1140s.
Moreover, nobody knows where the former residents of Chaco Canyon went.
Billman thinks it more likely that the victims at Cowboy Wash came from the
Chuska Mountains, some 60 miles of the site. What both hypotheses share,
however, is the idea that neighboring groups were using cannibalism as a
terrorist strategy to drive out competition for scarce resources.
There is no shortage of speculation on the causes of the suspected
cannibalism. But do the bones really tell a tale of cannibalism? With no
eyewitnesses, can anyone really be sure of what happened at Cowboy Wash
eight and a half centuries ago?
"How do you tell that a person committed a murder when nobody saw it?" asks
Tim White, a physical anthropologist at the University of California at
Berkeley. "Evidence." White has closely examined the bones found at Mancos
Canyon, and both he and Turner have proposed criteria that they say must be
met to make a finding of cannibalism. Among them are cut marks, burn
patterns, broken bones and "pot polish," the way sharply fragmented bone
gets rounded by rattling around in a pot of boiling water. "The question we
need to ask is, do people prepare other mammals in this fashion in this
culture? Because humans are large animals. If you find that the patterning
matches, then that becomes evidence," says White.
Turner, Billman, and others agree that, by these criteria, evidence from
many southwestern sites, including Cowboy Wash, clearly indicates
cannibalism. But Peter Bullock, a staff archeologist at the Museum of New
Mexico in Santa Fe, is not ready
to convict. He says that basing such
studies on animal-butchering practices biases the results toward a
consumption conclusion and fails to consider human motivations. Bones could
end up being scraped, shattered, and scorched as a result of warfare, mutilation, or burial practices, he says.
As an example, Bullock cites human remains recovered from the Battle of
Little Bighorn, where General George Custer and his troops were slain. "The
results looked pretty similar to this cannibalism stuff, but we know from
historical accounts that no cannibalism took place," he says. Kurt Dongoske,
an archeologist employed by the Hopi, agrees. "To say that these
disarticulated remains have been cannibalized is real stretch."
"We've got folks who are processing humans in exactly the same way they
process animals and we're supposed to believe that the end result was not
consumption?" White asks incredulously. "Why does it look exactly like
consumption?"
Native American representatives are silent on the matter. A spokesman for
the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, on whose land the Cowboy Wash bones were found,
declined to comment either on that site or on the
possibility of any incidents of cannibalism among the Anasazi. The tribe
also refused to allow outsiders to visit the excavated site or to view the
bones. Their reaction is understandable, some say. How would other people
feel if scientists dug up bodies at Arlington National Cemetery and declared
the soldiers cannibals? Not surprisingly, park service brochures handed out
at Mesa Verde make no mention of possibility of cannibalism either. The
bones will eventually be reburied by a Ute religious leader.
"We can't get the meat from the hand into the mouth," concedes Billman. "But
there is now a possibility that we may be able to do that. One of the last
things that was done on our site -- once the hearth had gone cold and was
filled with ash -- was someone squatted down in the hearth and defecated." A
preliminary analysis of the coprolite,
as the preserved specimen is called,
indicates that its owner's last meal was almost entirely animal protein.
Determining just what type of animal -- elk, deer, or human -- the protein
came from will be the job of Richard Marlar, a professor of molecular
biology at the University of Colorado at Denver. He heard about the Cowboy
Wash coprolite and offered to analyze its contents.
It might seem that Marlar could just look for human blood or cells in the
coprolite, but humans often shed their own intestinal cells in feces. So he
will test for the presence
of myoglobin, a protein found in human skeletal
muscle but not in the intestines. He
will dissolve samples of the coprolite
in a buffer solution and then add antibodies that recognize myoglobin. If
myoglobin is present, reactions with the antibodies will tint the solution.
Marlar also plans to test residues from cooking vessels found at the site.
Although such tests have been routinely used to identify bison, antelope,
and human blood at archeological sites, no one has used the techniques yet
to address the question of humans eating humans. But Marlar predicts that it
"could really answer
if cannibalism occurred, once and for all." And, if the
test is positive, archeologists will have even more reason to speculate on
scenarios about social turmoil in the Southwest. Of course, if the test is
negative, the case is still not closed. The abundance of evidence points to
cannibalism among the Anasazi. But without clear historical records, the
precise reason for that cannibalism -- if it occurred -- will probably never
be known.
February 1998
Catherine Dold
PO Box 4424
Boulder, Colorado 80306
303-543-2390
5/05