Posted on 09/27/2010 5:06:29 PM PDT by Little Bill
Not so very long ago that many archaeologists regarded the Ancestral Puebloan people–or the Anasazi, as researchers once called them–as a rather peaceful, mystical group of astronomers, artists, priests and farmers. They based this idea largely on their observations of modern Puebloan peoples: the Hopi, the Zuni and others who lived in traditional pueblos, such as Taos, and who often lived quiet lives of ritual and spirituality.
In the early 90s, some Southwestern archaeologists began questioning this received wisdom. David Wilcox, an archaeologist at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, hypothesized that the rulers of Chaco Canyon, a massive Ancestral Puebloan site, commanded a small army and demanded tribute from their southern neighbors, slaughtering any who didn’t comply. As evidence, Wilcox pointed to charnel pits excavated in dozens of Ancestral Puebloan sites dating to the late 10th and early 11th century C.E.: these pits looked like mass graves from a war zone.
First most Southwestern archaeologists just shook their head and smiled at Wilcox’s ideas. But evidence of very nasty times in the ancient Southwest began to accumulate. Physical anthropologist Christy Turner, now a professor emeritus at Arizona State University, and others detected traces of extreme violence and cannibalism on human bones unearthed at 40 different Ancestral Puebloan sites. Such acts of cannibalism, Wilcox suggested, were political messages, deliberate desecration of the dead as a warning to others.
This month, researchers added yet more dark shading to the picture in a paper published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. At a site known as Sacred Ridge in Colorado, Jason Chuipka, an archaeologist at Woods Canyon Archaeological Consultants, and his colleagues unearthed 14,882 human skeletal fragments–the remains of deliberately mutilated Ancestral Puebloan inhabitants–as well as two-headed axes smeared with human blood residues. The dead dated to the late 8th or early 9th century, a time when the first Ancestral Puebloan villages were forming.
To Chuipka and his co-author James Potter, an archaeologist at SWCA Environmental Consultants in Broomfield, Colorado, the evidence suggested that the inhabitants of Sacred Ridge–men, women and children–were singled out for a particularly terrible form of violence: ethnic conflict.
To what to make of all this? Why such a radical shift in our vision of the Ancestral Puebloan people? When I began thinking about this, I came up with two things.
First of all, physical anthropologists today know much more about the osteological indicators of warfare and cannibalism than they did thirty years ago. So they have a much clearer idea of what to look for. But the second thing goes to the very heart of archaeology itself. Journalists and other members of the public ask archaeologists all the time to explain what various artifacts and data mean.
We don’t really want to hear about 14,882 bone fragments. What we want to know is what happened to all those bodies and all those people. And our insatiable curiosity constantly forces archaeologists to interpret their findings, to make a story of them.
So archaeologists do what anybody else would do–they look for analogies in modern life. In the early 1970s, for example, when the Vietnam War raged, many researchers hypothesized that the collapse of the Classic Maya civilization was due to extreme warfare.
In the 1980s and 1990s, they pointed to environmental causes, such as soil erosion. And today, many researchers ascribe the collapse to climate change, specifically a series of devastating droughts.
More on the munchers from Chacko Canyon
Brotherly Brunch Ping.
It always seemed to me that Mesa Verde and the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi were awfully defensive for a tribe that didn’t know war ...
Clearly an issue with immigration enforcement.
No doubt that and there were naysayers among the Anasazi who said the funny looking guys with beards and robes who wanted them to bow 5 times a day were peaceful ~ and only wanted to build a mosque ~ not a victory monument, and then the big crunch started and next thing you know there were 18million bone fragments ~ and still there were those who were unconvinced and demanded we let them build their mosque ~ that they were peaceful.
They said the same thing about the Mayans too. Apparently, only white europeans were warlike.
But sooner or later, the evidence turns up .... We are all brothers of Cain under the skin.
Anyone who’s spent time in the Southwest looking at cliff dwellings, as I have, should realize they were hidden and inaccessible for good reason. I knew years ago those people lived in daily fear for their lives!</i>
Turner’s field work and theory was a missing puzzle piece for me. I don’t know if he’s completely right about Toltec domination and genocide of other pueblo people but I’m satisfied that something along those general lines took place. Now it’s “respectable” to think such thoughts thanks to Turner, the details should eventually fall into place.
... the Indians are always portrayed as more spiritual than the white-man. Their lack of understanding of certain natural events is attributed to spirits and they are always portrayed as in harmony with nature.
My family and I toured some caves in Pennsylvania and the guide pointed out smoke stains on the walls and ceiling of the cave ... caused by the white men who inhabited the caves on and off for about twenty years. The indians who had dwelt in the caves for thousands of years, had built fires for cooking and heating, but according to the park ranger, it was the smoke from the white man’s fires that caused the stains. I asked if the indian’s fires produced smoke and could have been responsible for some of the stains. The park ranger insisted that the indians had perfected smoke free fires. Smoke free.
Mesa Verda is certainly a good stronghold for defense. It’s awfully beautiful. I’d like to live there myself.
yes. And so much for decades of bs about the happy children of the plains and the forests who were one with nature and lived in peace and harmony until the evil, rapacious white-man showed up and everything went to Hell.The first peoples on this continent were a brutal, bloody war-mongering bunch of folks who waged war on each other constantly.
Another ethnic cleansing of the Pueblos might have occurred had the Spaniards not arrived in the Southwest when they did. That one would have been carried out by the Athabaskan migrants called the Apaches.
Of course, that is just a theory of mine, not one that goes over well those who like to think of the arrival of the white man as a curse to all the natives.
Whereas my ancestors were Scots and Germans, who lived to peaceably distill whiskey, brew beer, and tend their gardens, rather like hobbits.
No doubt sir, the ruins at Montezuma's Castle and even Montezuma's well present some formidable defenses for a tribe that "didn't expect" combat.
Those where my thoughts at age 12 when I first visited Mesa Verde with my parents in 1962.
If only we had that ancient knowledge now! No more carbon credits.
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"The attacking group slaughtered the people on the bluff. Anthropologists, led by Thomas Emerson, found the remains of 486 people from the attack. Many of these remains had signs of torture and mutilation. These included tongues being cut out, scalping, teeth broken, heads cut off, and other forms of dismemberment."
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