Dying for dinner?
A debate rages over desert cannibalism

BY RACHEL HARTIGAN

"Holy smokes, I'm looking at a feast." That's what anthropologist Christy Turner thought when he opened a cardboard box of skeletal remains at the Museum of Northern Arizona 30 years ago and found over a thousand broken and burned bones. They looked like butchered and cooked animal remains. But the Arizona State professor knew the bones belonged to humans.

Turner believes the battered bones hold the answer to a puzzle that has long preoccupied archaeologists: Why did the Anasazi start building massive stone pueblos around A.D. 900 at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico–structures that aligned with the sun, the moon, and each other–then abandon them 250 years later?

At first, Turner didn't particularly care who ate whom. His goal was to determine what signature, if any, cannibalism leaves on bones. Comparing butchered animal remains with those he suspected were cannibalized, he devised six criteria for cannibalism, from cuts by sharp defleshing tools to scorch marks from cooking fires. Using this list, he examined bones from 76 sites and concluded that, at 38 sites, 286 people were eaten.

But why? Turner believes he found the answer in central Mexico, where cultures that used cannibalism in religious ceremonies had left similar evidence. "It takes nearly blind faith in the effectiveness of geographical distance ... to believe that this [culture] failed to reach the American Southwest," he writes in his 1999 book, Man Corn. Turner speculates that members of a Mexican warrior cult headed north, where they found that killing and eating a few desert-farming Anasazi terrorized everyone else into paying tribute and building monuments to the Mexicans' religion. Eventually, the culture built on cannibalism collapsed–how, Turner does not know–and the Anasazi deserted Chaco Canyon. Today's Pueblo people are Anasazi descendants.

Food for thought. Man Corn–named after the Aztec word for a sacred meal of human meat–provoked a firestorm. Critics have charged him with everything from shoddy science to racism. He countered with a widely distributed manuscript–rejected by American Antiquity–denouncing them as "professionally reckless," "politically correct," and "rude."

Turner's proposal that ancient Mexicans invaded from the south has aroused the most derision. "The idea of a [Mexican] goon squad is ridiculous," says Kurt Dongoske, an archaeologist for the Hopi tribe. While remnants of trade with Mexico exist–pottery, copper bells, and macaw skeletons–there's little evidence of Mexicans' living in the area at the time. Turner's theory hangs on one skull found with notched teeth, a practice common in Mexico but rare in the Southwest. "Turner stepped beyond his level of expertise," sniffs Steven LeBlanc, director of collections at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Some archaeologists and Indians accuse Turner of recklessly ignoring native beliefs. "One of the worst things you can do in Pueblo society is to eat flesh," says Andrew Darling, an archaeologist with the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. "That's how you become a witch, and the penalty for witches is death." Suspected Pueblo witches were killed and their corpses ravaged to find the so-called evil heart. Darling believes those actions could leave the same bone signature as cannibalism. He says Turner's theory revives racist stereotypes of savage Indians.

Other archaeologists point out that little is known about how the Anasazi normally treated their dead. Standard burial practices could have caused the skeletal damage ascribed to cannibalism. Ventura Perez, a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, found faint marks around the jaws of some of Turner's skulls. Perez suspects the marks are light because the skulls had been stripped long after the flesh had begun to decompose–suggesting that meat removal was a burial practice.

Peabody's LeBlanc thinks a more likely explanation is that the Chaco Anasazi brutalized a subclass of their own people. Healed bone fractures suggest that many Anasazi were beaten repeatedly. Others were dumped on garbage heaps after they died. And still others may be Turner's cannibal victims, butchered like game animals but not necessarily served for dinner.

Turner has his allies. Tim White, professor of human evolutionary studies at the University of California-Berkeley, compared broken, scarred, and scattered Anasazi and animal bones from Mancos Canyon in Colorado and discovered striking similarities. He dismisses the reburial theory, saying no other society uses the same method to prepare food and bury its dead. Even so, he refuses to speculate about who was behind the cannibalism. "It's too early," he says.

Fossil find. White and Turner thought they could prove that some people had cut up and cooked other people–but not that anyone was chewed and swallowed. Until two years ago, that is. A group of archaeologists working for Soil Systems Inc., an archaeological consulting firm, claims to have found the smoking gun. While excavating Colorado's Cowboy Wash, they unearthed fossilized fecal matter containing human remains, probably left by an attacker to desecrate an Anasazi hearth. Turner's critics say the ancient excrement could have come from anyone or anything, and, even if it is human, it only proves that a single person indulged in a taste for his fellows.

Nonetheless, there's a growing awareness among archaeologists that something awful happened among the Anasazi. Soon after abandoning Chaco, they began building cliff dwellings from which they could stave off almost any attack. But what were they afraid of? Each other?