Posted on 03/02/2005 10:33:03 AM PST by Destro
Thought this looked familiar.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1301293/posts
Looks like it could be interesting. :-)
FEATURE ARTICLE - October 25, 1999
For reasons still debated among scientists today, Anasazi culture in the Southwest had collapsed by 1300, creating what is known to academics as "The Great Abandonment."
According to Navajo oral histories, the Anasazi were dispersed by a whirlwind because they had abandoned the ways of their ancestors. Whatever the causes, the eastern part of the Four Corners region became uninhabited in a flicker of geologic time. Yet the legacy left behind, observed David Ortiz, staff anthropologist for Navajo archaeology at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, "is the image of supreme beings, skilled at astrology, peaceful, cooperative and wise."
People from all over the world have made much of the Anasazi, a Navajo word for "ancient ones' or, some say, "ancient enemies," believing them to have been deeply spiritual. But what if that peaceful image is wrong? Few ever raised the question. Those who did were rewarded with blank stares, angry letters and canceled meetings. One who persisted was Christy G. Turner II, the regents' professor of anthropology at Arizona State University at Tempe (HCN, 5/24/99). And now, the mainstream panjandrums of Southwestern archaeology and anthropology can no longer ignore him.
The Pollyanna image of a peaceful people has been cracked - some say shattered forever. The reason is the publication of Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest, by Turner and his late wife, Jacqueline. It is the first detailed account of cannibalism and violence on a regional scale in the prehistoric American Southwest, especially in the Chaco Canyon area.
The title of the book comes from the Aztec word tlacatlaolli, a "sacred meal of sacrificed human meat, cooked with corn." The book itself is a prodigiously descriptive 547-page tome, many years in the making and now destined for more printings and a PBS television special. It's a shocker.
"The land of the Anasazi was not a pleasant place to be, after all," Turner says. "It was just as violent as any place else in the world. Mean and unhappy."
Turner's conclusion, Ortiz predicts, will take "Southwestern archaeology in a new direction and it will take a long time for the dust to settle."
Some 20 centuries ago, the Anasazi began to wander into the steep escarpments, open desert and high mesas of northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado. There, the culture they arrived with underwent a transformation.
Hunters and gatherers became farmers and artists, who made sophisticated basketry, built pueblos the size of the Roman Colosseum and fashioned intricate cliff dwellings, the remnants of which are tourist favorites in parks and canyons in the Four Corners region today.
Of all the intriguing Indian cultures in the Southwest, these enigmatic people are the most romanticized. In the prose of tourist brochures, in the verbiage of academic journals, in cyberspace and on videos about life and culture at Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly and hundreds of other sites, their civilization is recognized as the great hearth of Southwestern culture.
The Anasazi conducted sophisticated trading activities with Mesoamerica, the Hohokam in Arizona's Salt River Valley, the Mogollon in Central Arizona and with the natives in California, exchanging beans, corn and turquoise for parrot feathers and abalone shells. By 1200, the most famous site, Chaco Canyon, had become the center of an economic, ritual and social system spread out over an estimated 100,000 square miles. One hundred years later, it collapsed.
Was it drought, famine, enemy raiders? Was it disease? Sudden climate change? Overpopulation? A curtain fell on their Golden Age and the people departed swiftly, in some cases leaving pet birds behind to die on their roosts. They bequeathed a ghost world for future explorers to discover.
Despite the romantic aura of the Anasazi, many famous scientists down through the years have suspected them of cannibalism - Fewkes, Hodge, Pepper, the Weatherills, the Listers, Pilles, White and Danson, among others - and Turner presents Man Corn as a tribute to them.
"The vast majority saw it correctly," he says, "but their work was never acknowledged in the profession's mainstream because it flew in the face of conventional wisdom."
Turner says cannibalism was practiced for almost four centuries, starting around 900. It was most common in the Four Corners area, especially among people living in Chaco Canyon and outlying Chacoan great houses, and it increased dramatically shortly before the Anasazi abandoned their pueblos.
This assertion took a long time for Turner and his late wife to construct. Years of research were required under auspices including the Museum of Northern Arizona at Flagstaff and the National Geographic Society, before Turner felt he was on sufficiently firm ground to challenge prevailing thought on the Anasazi.
Explains Turner: "Like others in the field, we had to work our way through the conventional wisdom that the people who created the beautiful pottery and architecture could not possibly have done these things. I mean, the ruins are terribly romantic. It is beautiful country, a fantasy world, and that is a great influence on lots of archaeologists. Down through the years, countless people visited the ruins. They came away with everything but the truth."
Not for the fainthearted, Man Corn analyzes in excruciating detail 76 Anasazi sites at which Turner says he can confirm that violence or cannibalism occurred: 11 in Arizona, the rest in Utah, Colorado and New Mexico.
Amazingly, the first site was discovered by Walter Hough in May 1901 on a large butte east-southeast of Holbrook, Ariz., dated to the period 1200-1300. His discovery never made it into the textbooks. Within a year after the excavation, however, Hough wrote of his findings in Harper's Monthly magazine:
In the cemetery, among other orderly burials, was uncovered a heap of broken bones belonging to three individuals. It was evident that the shattered bones had been clean when they were placed in the ground, and some fragments showed scorching by fire. The marks of the implements used in cracking the bones were still traceable. Without doubt this ossuary is the record of a cannibal feast, and its discovery is interesting to science as being the first material proof of cannibalism among our North American Indians.
The charge of cannibalism raises obvious questions. First, how can scientists distinguish between violence and cannibalism?
Turner answers: "It comes directly from bone evidence. Bone damage is able to be classified, inventoried, identified and pigeonholed. It turns out that in factoring out different kinds of damage, cannibalism far exceeds anything that we can refer to as violence.
"That is because the key component in violence is simply violent death, torture, mutilation. It stops there. There is none of this breaking up of the people, whole skeletons reduced to little tiny pieces. We can make a powerful inference that all those little pieces have been processed for cooking.
"In cases of violence, they didn't go to the next step of sitting down and peeling the people, defleshing them, breaking the bones open for marrow and showing us every sign of cooking - heads roasted, bodies boiled, bones pot-polished."
Across the Southwest, voices have risen in angry protest against Turner's thesis. "He has not proven a thing," charges Kurt Dongoske, tribal archaeologist of the Hopi Tribe. "What he has demonstrated is that people were hacked apart, their bones dismembered. He presents no evidence of human ingestion."
Dongoske's anger swells as the conversation in Flagstaff continues. "Cannibalism is a pretty terrible thing. Look at the rock art in the Southwest. Don't you think that someone would have depicted the consumption of human flesh in the petroglyphs and pictographs? They depict everything else - Spaniards arriving, clan migration routes, ceremonies. If human flesh had been consumed, it would have been depicted on the rock walls. Turner's work is part of a long legacy to denigrate Indians, to dehumanize them."
Over in Santa Fe, Peter Bullock, an anthropologist at the Museum of New Mexico, dismisses Turner's work entirely. "We don't accept it over here. In fact, we consider it pretty much of a joke."
To these gibes, Turner responds: "People say, "You cannot prove cannibalism." Basically, this is a misconception about how science works. Science works based on footprints and very powerful inferences. You can only prove something with mathematics."
Later in the interview, he muses: "What did I do to catch these people off guard? Why are they so defensive? Why are they so paranoid? What did we uncover?"
Warren Cremer, a veteran Southwestern anthropologist based in Arizona's Verde Valley, is persuaded that the controversial book is solid science. "Turner has gathered, examined and presented his evidence with great care and precise measurements. Other scientists can independently test his claims. So far, none of his critics have challenged his methodology."
Another scientist who thinks Man Corn should be taken seriously is David R. Wilcox, senior research archaeologist at the Museum of Northern Arizona and sometime colleague of Turner through the years.
Sitting in his small office overflowing with books, coffee cups and telephone messages in the museum's research wing, Wilcox explains, "Turner presents a very reasonable scientific argument for cannibalism ... but to say that all Anasazis were cannibals is not the correct inference. It is a vast generalization. It is not as though everybody did it, even if he is right.
"But that there were individuals at certain times and places who, for reasons still controversial, may have conducted massacres of multiple people, then butchered and cooked and quite possibly ate them, is very difficult to deny. As for his theories as to why they did it, we don't know."
A breakthrough concerning some ancient bones in the Museum of Northern Arizona archives in 1967 led to what Arizona State University paleoanthropologist William Kimbel terms Turner's "legitimate inference" about Anasazi cannibalism.
Fascinated by prehistoric bones and teeth, Turner asked a museum curator to let him examine an odd-looking cardboard box resting on a top shelf.
The box contained human bone shards excavated three years earlier from a remote site in northern Arizona called Polacca Wash. The bones had been defleshed, cut up and roasted, and they looked, Turner recalls, like "food trash."
In 1969, Turner presented his findings of cannibalism, co-written with colleague Nancy Morris. The work was not welcomed, either by his peers or by Native Americans - the Hopi, in particular. Unperturbed, Turner went to work gathering older bone assemblages from many Anasazi sites excavated by his scientific predecessors. He examined more than 15,000 skeletons.
Turner experienced an even greater rejection of his research at the 51st Pecos Conference - the World Series of archaeology conferences - at Dolores, Colo., in 1988. According to the program, there was to be a mini-symposium on cannibalism, given the amount of "supposedly cannibalized bone that had been found in recent years."
The program was canceled at the last minute because of angry phone calls and threats of disruption. This was the first time a session had ever been canceled, according to Richard Woodbury's 60 Years of Southwestern Archaeology - A History of the Pecos Conference. Ironically, meeting planners had feared sensational accounts in the press. The cancellation, perhaps, drew even wider coverage.
Turner never wavered. Just the opposite; his research intensified and came to fruition in 1993, during a long meeting with Wilcox, who'd laboriously created a map displaying the location and distribution of the great pueblos at Chaco Canyon. Turner placed his suspected cannibal sites on Wilcox's layout of the pueblos.
"It was a "Eureka!" moment," Turner recalls. "All the research came together. David's map coincided with the location of the cannibalized bone deposits. It was then I knew that the civilization centered in Chaco Canyon was likely the locus of Anasazi cannibalism."
The word cannibal, Turner writes, comes from the Carib Indian tribal name, referring to a person who eats human flesh. Though everywhere, cultures have denounced it - -cannibalism is bad, and bad people are cannibals' - Turner provides details of the practice going back thousands of years as reported in worldwide folklore, oral traditions, sacred writings, anthropological narratives, war stories, urban police records and tales from lost wanderers about cannibal peoples and cannibal events.
"Truth to tell," Turner declares, "cannibalism has occurred everywhere at one time or another."
But why?
The reasons vary from place to place. They range from starvation cannibalism in the Arctic to cannibalism as a ritual element of social control in Mesoamerica. In China, it was an institutionalized way of showing love and respect. In pre-Columbian Brazil, it was a way for obtaining the power and strength of a sacrificial victim. Finally, cannibalism is associated with social pathology the world over.
Turner favors a combination of three reasons for cannibalism among the Anasazi: ritual human sacrifice, social control and abnormal, criminal behavior.
But Turner concedes that after many attempts to unlock that mystery, "There is no way at this time to determine who did the eating or who was eaten - friends, relatives, slaves, strangers." He reached that conclusion after searching for similar sites in California, in the Rocky Mountains, on the Great Plains and among the Anasazis' neighbors.
It was by the process of elimination that he decided that Southwestern cannibalism "appears to have originated in Mexico, where the practice was common and dates back 2,500 years ..." Turner wrote, "We speculate that this force consisted of cultists and warriors of the Quetzalcoatl - Xipe Totec - Tezcatlipoca deity complex who overwhelmed the local residents, much the way the soldiers led by Cortez fell upon Mexico."
"Terrorism is what we are talking about," he says. "Cannibalism was the weapon that forced Chaco Canyon to be built." He rests his case in part on the great wooden beams supporting the roofs of the large pueblos. It is believed that the beams were cut at least 50 miles away.
"You don't haul 200,000 beams of wood voluntarily; people were coerced into producing Chaco," Turner theorizes. "The only way you coerce people is through terror and power." Turner also speculates that workers may have been drugged.
It is over this assertion that colleagues such as David Wilcox at the Museum of Northern Arizona part company with Turner. "Christy has got a very reasonable scientific argument for cannibalism. However, he is way out on a limb on the Mesoamerican connection."
Wilcox agrees that some sort of "organized terrorism occurred in and around Chaco Canyon. But then one runs into the Chinese Box syndrome - lots of meat was being generated. Why? Whatever they were doing was not acceptable in human terms. When Chaco was abandoned, evidence of cannibalism disappears.
"Was it evil that caused the Great Abandonment?" Wilcox wonders.
The controversies Turner has stirred up may boil for decades. When asked if he thought the publication of his book would discourage tourism in the Four Corners region, Turner smiled. "Too much money is involved in commercial tourism," he says. "Everybody has been in denial about horrors amongst Indians in ancient times. I suspect that, despite Man Corn, that denial will continue.
"I am certain that I've found the answer," he concludes. "Let others test it. This is no longer an interesting challenge."
Maybe the mystery has been solved for Turner, and maybe the opposition got to him. When told that Turner was leaving the country for a while, Kurt Dongoske said, "Good. The sooner the better."
David Ortiz summarizes the frustration. "We will never know for sure whether Turner is correct unless we can find a way to go back in time," he says. "But he is very well respected and I am urging my Indian students at Northern Arizona University to leave concerns of racism aside and look at the facts.
"The late Carl Sagan called science "a candle in the dark." Turner has lighted a big candle for the rest of us."
James Bishop Jr. is an amateur archaeologist and freelance writer in Sedona, Arizona, and the author of the Edward Abbey biography Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist. A version of this story appeared in Phoenix magazine.
This is from the actual legislation:
SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) AUTHORIZATION- The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to--
(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.
(b) PRESIDENTIAL DETERMINATION- In connection with the exercise of the authority granted in subsection (a) to use force the President shall, prior to such exercise or as soon thereafter as may be feasible, but no later than 48 hours after exercising such authority, make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination that--
(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic or other peaceful means alone either (A) will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq or (B) is not likely to lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and
(2) acting pursuant to this joint resolution is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorist and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
(c) War Powers Resolution Requirements-
(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION- Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.
(2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS- Nothing in this joint resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.
The "whereas's" are here.
Blah blah blah. Bunch of savages only good for killin', right? Funny how these "stone age cultures" were able to create democratic governments (Iroquois Confederation), permanent villages, farming techniques, and all the other trappings of "civilized" society, all while being ignorant barbaric savages, eh? Maybe those were just hobbies. Ya know, things to do when they get tired of killing everything that moves.
However, their lack of technology did not prevent them warring among themselves, practicing genocide (Iroquois, Mahegan), slavery (Choctaws, Chickasaws) and cannibalism (Navajo, Anasazi).
And yet, the technological advances in european societies didn't stop them from warring among themselevs(brits and french and dutch and germans and spanish and...), practicing genocide (I'm sure you can think of several examples. If not, try picking up a book sometime), slavery (british, spanish etc...)... But hey, those indians did it all without church approval, and for that they must die.
Who made the Mound Builders extinct, since they vanished long before any white man set foot in the Americas (officially)? Who wiped out the Anazasi, the Fremont, and on and on and on?
Actually, do you have evidence that the Anisazi or the Mound Builders are actually extinct? Could it possibly be that they MOVED? I mean, the Iroquois are believed to have originated in teh american southwest, and ended up in upstate New York. Different climates lead to major culture changes, and stuff. It could be something as simple as that. We just don't know, but it's a lot easier to just believe something, so as to believe the worst in other cultures that differ from our own.
Answer: Other Indians wiped those tribes out.
Actually, we don't know that. There are none around that we know of to tell us what their fate was, and who, if anyone, was responsible for it. But hey, why not just toss baseless accusations out there. More fun that way.
1675 - 1676 -- King Philip's War -- a larger percentage of the American population was lost in this war than in any other American war. The indians burned down whole villages and slaughter the inhabitants, but they lost the war.
A large percentage of american indian lives were lost during King Phillip's War, when colonists burned down entire indian villages and slaughtered the inhabitants, and/or sold them into slavery in Spain and in the Carribean. But hey, let's just bitch about it when the indians do it, and totally ignore wholesale slaughter on the part of the oh-so-civilized whites, right?
1750's -- French-Indian War -- Indians sided with the French against the British. They committed atrocities and they lost the war.
Maybe it's just me, but from this alone, you appear to be an ignorant uneducated individual who has never actually looked at any historical text. You seem to lump all indians into one group, and ignore the fact that not all indians were on the same side. For example, some indians were allied with the french - however, many indian nations were allies of the british during the various French and Indian wars. But hey, why let a little thing like facts get in the way, right?
1770's -1780's -- American Revolution -- Indians sided with the Britsh. They lost the war.
Well, SOME indians sided with the british. Other indians sided with the rebellious colonists. In fact, this split often occurred within indian nations - the Iroquois are a perfect example. Some members of the confederacy sided with the brits, and some with the colonists. But again, why let a little thing like facts get in the way...
1812 -- The Indians again sided with the British. And again they lost.
SOME indians sided with the british during that war, and for very good reasons, might I add. However, not all indians participated, or even took sides, during the war of 1812. Some did, some didn't. But again, why let little things like facts get in the way of a good indian-bashing, right?
Pick up a book someday, open it, and actually READ. You might, one day, learn something. You might actually LIKE it.
From: Bones of Contention
The controversies Turner has stirred up may boil for decades. When asked if he thought the publication of his book would discourage tourism in the Four Corners region, Turner smiled. "Too much money is involved in commercial tourism," he says. "Everybody has been in denial about horrors amongst Indians in ancient times. I suspect that, despite Man Corn, that denial will continue.
"I am certain that I’ve found the answer," he concludes. "Let others test it. This is no longer an interesting challenge."
Maybe the mystery has been solved for Turner, and maybe the opposition got to him. When told that Turner was leaving the country for a while, Kurt Dongoske said, "Good. The sooner the better."
I also disagreed with said poster's statements and refuted them - see above.
Thanks. I saw that. I get a little cranky when people post incomplete, or distorted facts, about my ancestors. :)
What type of large, four-legged animal with medium-sized ears is it that is standing next to a man as depicted on the Chitzen-Itza stone carving commonly called "The Chitzen-Itza Horse"?
Most PC archeologists reject the conclusion it is actually a horse, but even llamas were not generally as far north as Yucatan. Maybe a Saint Bernard?
Also, the Mayan Rain God Chac, depicted with a large curling nose, most resembles an elephant, but again, PC archeologists reject that conclusion as well. These two PC rejections survive despite the fact that pre-columbian bones of horses and elephants have been discovered on the North American continent at various locations.
Could it be that American "Man" has domesticated/associated with animals the PC traditionalists don't want to acknowledge?
You post this like it is something new. I've know about Turner's work since 1990, when I had a chance to examine the exact same bones that Turner used in his research. Not by reading an article, or listening to a speech, but firsthand.
Turner makes a leap from pretty tight evidence of cannibalism from those bones to terrorism from Mesoamerica, with little connection in between. It's a neat hypothesis, but it is very hard to test. There is a paucity of evidence of sustained contact between mesoamerica and the american southwest. That doesn't mean there is none or that ideas travel only through material expressions. All it means is there not overwhelming evidence to support Turner's Mesoamerica terrorism idea.
Things may have changed since I did this research 5-6 years ago--I haven't kept up with the research since I moved to a different career.
The Pecos Conference is hardly the "World Series of Archaeology Conferences". It is a place for people to report preliminary findings at the end of a field season, camp, drink beer, and have a great time together (usually out in the middle of nowhere). Turner's work is much more completely described in Turner and Turner (1995).
Not credible, I'm sorry.
Archeology has to sometimes make such leaps of connection - as long as you accept that it is a leap and you wil be willing to change your mind when new facts present themselves. I accept the Meso-American explanation for the introduction of a social system that did not exist before or after this period.
>>I accept the Meso-American explanation for the introduction of a social system that did not exist before or after this period.
Could be. It's plausible and one that has been kicked around for almost a century, but like I said--ideas don't leave material evidence, so it is extremely hard to test. His evidence of human mutilation (based on my study) is irrefutable. All the signs point to cannibalism, but it is a dirty word and there are political forces that tried to squelch him. I've never heard of the UNM guy Peter Bullock--and I worked in New Mexico as a professional archaeologist. He must be one of those museum rats who has never seen the end of a trowel.
>>Archeology has to sometimes make such leaps of connection
Yes, we archaeologists have to make lots of inferential leaps, usually much to our own chagrin.
I think we'd have fun sitting down over a beer discussing this back and forth, but this forum really makes it tough to do point/counter-points effectively without a lot more time.
Suffice to say I disagree with some of the particulars of Turner's conclusions, but the bulk of his research is meticulous. The same can not be said for all archaeologists working in the SW.
Yes, you certainly are right. The "mainstream" texts when I went to school---and I learned from Morrison and COmmager, too---were left, but not ridiculous. They celebrated American victories in war, gave the Founders their due, and barely touched on social history, which now dominates every aspect of history texts. Thus the obsession with ethnic/gender "balance", which soon will be further balanced by homosexual inclusion.
Woods, sorry to say, isn't credible.
I have nowhere to confirm this on the Web, but I know that Bulgaria declared war on the US in the last months of its alliance with Germany in WWII. The Germans were pressing Bulgaria to declare war on the USSR, despite popularity of Russia there. Tzar Boris, instead, declared a purely nominal war on the US, -- which dropped all the unused bombs, intended for Roumania's Ploesti, on Sofia.
The USSR, by the way, did not hesitate to declare war on Bulgaria, despite its severing all ties with the Third Reich as the Red Army was on the north bank of the Danube.
No, I think that's supposed to be Stonewall Jackson.
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