Man Corn: Anasazi, Cannibalism, and the Mesoamerican Connection

On a recent trip to visit Edmund in Albuquerque, we went to see the cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument. The ruins reminded me of a New Yorker article I read years ago, about evidence of cannibalism among the Anasazi (the Cliff Dwellers). It was a damn cool article. I even saw a related NOVA episode soon after. Those mysterious Anasazi! They came, they built some nifty condos and townhomes, they left suddenly, leaving untidy heaps of shattered human bones.

I searched in vain on The Internets for a copy of this article. As far as I can tell, the New Yorker is like a damn information black hole. There's no way obvious way to look up articles published in the New Yorker; there isn't even a title index. What good is that?

However, American southwest cannibalism doesn't have a particularly large body of knowledge, and my inquiries soon converged on the anthropologist Christy Turner, who, with his wife Jacqueline, published a book about the whole southwest cannibalism thing. The book is called:

Turner II, Christy G. and Jacqueline. Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest (Salt Lake City, Utah: The University of Utah Press, 1999)

Man Corn

When I picked up Man Corn at the library, I was surprised to find that it's not a popular science book. Man Corn is a hefty, scholarly work, and the bulk of the pages are devoted to a catalog of cannibalism evidence from Southwestern archeology sites. It's a grim read.

The title of the book from the Nahuatl word tlacatlaolli, a sacred meal of human meat cooked with corn (p. 417). How delightful.

Turner's book in a nutshell:

• Turner develops methods for identifying cannibalism in human remains
• Evidence ("Fingerprint") of cannibalism (p. 22)
  • high-rate of unaccounted bones
  • all or most body segments disarticulated
  • vertebrae are missing
  • postmortem berakage in 40-100% of skeletal elements
  • breakage by percussion hammering; reaming of marrow cavity in most long bones
  • head, face, and long bone breakage
  • burning of bones after butchering
  • skinning marks
  • animal gnawing and chewing in only a small percentage of elements
  • damage sequence: cutting, braking, burning, gnawing
  • pseudo-tools from human bone
• Pot polishing
  • visible on bones
  • results from stirring bone fragments in a cooking vessel
• Further taphonomic analysis
  • Distinct from marks left by hungry animals (e.g. rats gnawing on bones)
  • Similar to evidence of Native American methods for large animal processing
  • Defleshing
    • Marks from chopping blows
  • Extraction of "bone grease"
    • "bone grease" = marrow
    • Large bones cracked and boiled to extract marrow
    • Large bones stripped of meat, heated over coals
    • Break bone mid-shaft
    • Extract marrow
    • Break and boil remainder of bone
    • Only knobs at ends of bone are left

  • Human remains which result from violence & cannibalism are very distinct from "considerate burial" remains (p. 39)

  • Catalog of evidence
• Discussion of cannibalism in Mexico
  • Apparently, human sacrifice and cannibalism were the centerpiece of Mesoamerican cultures (particularly Aztecs)
  • "Although scholars debate the magnitude of Aztec cannibalism and reasons for it, we believe it is unnecessary to argue that the practice existed." (p. 415)
  • Practiced "on a scale known nowhere else in the Americas..."
  • Sacrifice and cannibalism: an instrument for social control
  • "The Aztec world...seems to have crossed a threshold into what we consider pathological..." (p. 421)
• Southwestern Cannibalism
  • Evidence concentrated in the Anasazi culture region
    • No cannibalism outside of Anasazi culture
    • mostly Chaco Canyon
  • Turner's theory:
    • Toltec civil war ~1170 AD
    • Warrior-priests migrated northward to New Mexico
      • "Cultists" devoted to gods Tezcatlipoca and Xipe Totec ("Our Lord the Flayed One")

    • Plenty of evidence in southwest of Mexican trade, goods & memes

      • Evidence of cannibalism doesn't appear before 900 AD
      • Corn, corn culture
      • pottery
      • cotton / textiles
      • roads, great houses
      • religious figures (we saw Quetzalcoatl at Bandelier)
    • Entered San Juan basin around 900 AD (p. 483)
    • "...found a suspicious but pliant population whom they terrorized into reproducing the theocratic lifestyle they had previously known in Mesoamerica. This involved heavy payments of tribute, constructing the Chaco system of gerat houses and roads, and providing victims for ceremonial sacrifice."
    • "The Mexicans achieved their objectives through the use of warfare, violence examples, and terrifying cult ceremonies that included human sacrifice and cannibalism."

Further Tidbits

Evidence of deadly epidemic in Sayodneechee burial cave in NE Arizona: "'...the cist must have been filled at one time, perhaps to hold the dead from some particularly virulent epidemic.'" (p,. 45)

Evidence of epidemic in Tseahatso Cave, near Mummy Cave in Canyon del Muerto: "'At the bottom of a cist was an enormous basket packed with the bodies... Clearly, some terrible contagious children's disease had swept the cave...'" (p. 45)

Ethnohistory for central Mexico: Fray Bernardino de Sahagun (p. 416)

• Sahagun, Fray Bernardino de. A History of Ancient Mexico 1547-1577 Translated by F.R. Bandelier from the Spanish version of C.M. de Bustamante. Fisk University Press, Nashville.

tzompantli - skull rack(?!). Two are described by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, located in Xocotlan and the central square of Tenochtitlan.

Postscript

I found the New Yorker article about Christy and the Anasazi. It was written by Douglas Preston http://www.prestonchild.com/thunder/thunder_cannib.htm.