Beyond Stone & Bone
Were Some Ancestral Puebloan People the Victims of Ethnic Conflict?
by Heather Pringle
September 24, 2010
It was 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.
But 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.
At 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.
http://archive.archaeology.org/blog/were-the-ancestral-puebloan-people-victims-of-ethnic-cleansing/
