Eating Them Out of House and Home

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 2, 1999 | by John Elvin

Archaelogists are debating evidence that pueblo-dwelling American Indians in the Southwest practiced cannibalism for centuries -- until they mysteriously disappeared.

One of history's most perplexing riddles involves the disappearance of the cliff-dwelling Anasazi Indians, known popularly as a remarkably advanced, mystical, peaceful and agrarian culture that once inhabited the parched, desolate, vast Four Corners region of present Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico in the late pre-Columbian era. The stark and stunning sandstone pueblos they abandoned around the 14th century are among America's great wonders, attracting hordes of tourists to Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon and numerous other sites of nearly mythical fame.

What happened? Why did the Anasazi clear out as though vaporized, leaving a treasure trove of worldly goods behind? Christy G. Turner II, bioarchaeologist at Arizona State University and author of the controversial book Man Corn, has been on the case for more than 30 years. After looking at some 15,000 sets of butchered, broken and burned bones, his verdict: cannibalism.

Turner theorizes that the American Southwest in the centuries around the turn of the first millennium was the stomping ground of a band of Charles Manson-type cannibals: Toltec thugs from Mexico who ate their way through the local population. This sensational scenario has brought him enormous publicity; his claims have been examined by National Geographic, Discover, the New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times, to name a few popular forums. In his book Turner states point-blank that "cannibalism was practiced intensively for almost four centuries" in the region inhabited by the Anasazi. The public, shall we say, seems to be eating it up.

But in an area more remote from the eyes of the general public -- in the scientific journals and at the specialist conferences -- Turner is taking a beating. In public comments and in a growing stack of professional papers, many scientists who have worked the same territory as Turner are criticizing his conclusions for what may be political reasons.

Prominent among the critics is Debra L. Martin, professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. Martin, who heads the college's U.S. Southwest and Mexico Program in the School of Natural Science, is reviewing Turner's book for a scholarly journal and working with a Hopi archaeologist on a rebuttal of his findings. She has worked on many of the sites and collections studied by Turner.

The bone damage Turner insists is evidence of cannibalism also could be "found in a number of other kinds of contexts such as ritual dismemberment, secondary burial, ceremonial reduction and presentation of bones as in ancestor veneration, witchcraft execution, and disturbed burials," Martin tells Insight. "It might have been torturing and killing enemies, but it might have been veneration, honoring the dead by keeping their remains around, or ritual eating -- it's very complex. What if some of it was the opposite of violence, curating bones a particular way to keep the power of the grandparents available?"

While each of these possibilities might take a few hours in the classroom to explain in full, the point is that any number of "variables" could account for the damage but "they are not taken into consideration by Turner" she says. In addition to her problems with the cannibalism theory in general, Martin also disputes Turner's "Toltec-thug" scenario as a "flawed, simplistic model" that ignores many alternative explanations.

Turner, in published statements, has said he believes that colleagues are challenging him because he has shattered the politically correct stereotype of the spiritual, pastoral American Indian. Martin, for instance, rips into him on his very use of the word "cannibal." One of her concerns is that the general reader will view the term in keeping with modern notions that focus on nutritional desperation or psychopathic depravity.

The term itself, Martin notes, was concocted by Christopher Columbus when he thought he had encountered people subject to the Khan, or "canibes." Martin, who takes a rather political view of the matter, says Columbus promoted the idea that the indigenous people were "flesh-eaters" in support of a campaign of conquest, Christianization and slavery. "Turns out they were not [human] flesh-eaters, but [his] term became equated with all flesh-eating."

Martin says that the word covers a range of behaviors that were quite acceptable to the groups practicing them, such as the symbolic gesture of eating a bit of an ancestor or fearsome enemy to obtain power. She mentions exocannibalism, eating those not of your ethnic group, and endocannibalism, only eating those within your group, adding: "The point is Turner uses the word quite loosely and then smoke-screens the whole thing in pseudoscience with the bone data. Those of us who do skeletal analysis think it's pretty shoddy science."

At the same time, Turner has influential allies. David Wilcox, curator of the Museum of Northern Arizona, told me Los Angeles Times, "We are in a period where everything Native American is [seen as] spiritual, sensitive and wonderful. We would like to believe that all of the nasty stuff was introduced by the Europeans, and before that it was all truth, beauty and love. Sorry, that's just not so" David Roberts, an archaeologist and author of the book In Search of the Old Ones: Exploring the Anasazi World of the Southwest, says he reviewed the evidence with Turner and is "absolutely convinced" of Anasazi cannibalism.