Tribes Angered By Theory That Anasazi Cannibalized Each Other

CHACO CANYON, N.M. - Here in the desert, in the shadows that the mesas offer against the summer sun, a squabble has broken out over whether the Anasazi - the ancestors of today's pueblo Indian tribes - ate their dead when their culture was endangered.

On one side of the debate are a handful of archaeologists and anthropologists who say there's no other way to interpret the gruesome damage to the centuries-old Anasazi (the "ancient ones") remains that they have studied.

"It is not simply cut marks, not simply burning, not simply bones being bashed, not simply the polish that comes from bones being boiled in a pot - but all of these things" in individual corpses that point to cannibalism, said David Wilcox, senior research archaeologist at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff.

On the other side, and adamant that if there was cannibalism the Anasazi did not eat their own, are members of the Zuni, Hopi and other Indian nations, the descendants of the Anasazi culture, some of whom still live in stacked adobe pueblos much like those found at historic sites such as Chaco Canyon, or Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado.

"Nobody wants to have an ancestor who's a cannibal," said Edmund Ladd, a Zuni and curator of ethnology at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe.

While Ladd is willing to concede that the Anasazi culture that existed at Chaco Canyon from 900 to the mid-1200s might have practiced ritual killings, he draws the line at further conclusions.

"One set of evidence doesn't make all the Anasazi cannibals," he said.

Most of the debate had been confined to scholarly journals until the spring, when National Geographic published an article. It quoted Kurt Dongoske, an Anglo who works as an archaeologist for the Hopi tribe: "You can't prove cannibalism until you actually find human remains in prehistoric excrement."

Since that article appeared, said G.B. Cornucopia, a seasonal ranger at Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, he's been peppered with requests from tourists for more information, information he had rarely been asked about before.

Chaco Canyon, accessible only by a badly washboarded dirt road across the greasewood-dotted northwestern New Mexico desert, is believed to have been a center of Anasazi culture.

Here, the Anasazi built elaborate 800-room pueblos that might have housed a city of up to 2,000 people, who supported themselves on the crops they irrigated from shallow seeps at the canyon rim, and with what they could trap of the area's annual 8 inches of rainfall.

For 300 years, Chaco dominated the Anasazi world. Its residents built a system of roads that stretched for 200 miles, and their trade extended into Mexico.

But in the mid-1200s, the pueblos at Chaco Canyon were suddenly abandoned in a pattern seen at other Anasazi sites around the Southwest. The supposed cannibalism took place about the same time, adding credence to theories that this was a culture under extreme stress, whose members resorted to desperate measures to stave off threats of some type.

Scholars have thought for years that the Anasazi fled killer droughts, or invading tribes, but their departure remains one of the mysteries of archaeology.

While their culture flourished, though, they had been considered a peaceful, agrarian people.

Two years ago, Wilcox co-wrote a scholarly article, "Screams of the Butterfly," that examined evidence that the Anasazi were anything but.

At some Anasazi sites, archaeologists have found bodies with arrows imbedded, or headless bodies, he said. At Chaco Canyon, for instance, while most burial rooms featured naked bodies wrapped in mats, one room contained a man who was buried with 56,000 pieces of turquoise - and 13 women whose skulls had been crushed, said guide Heather Havey.

The most vocal proponent of the cannibalism theory is Christy G. Turner 2d, a professor at Arizona State University, who has been publishing his evidence in scholarly journals for a quarter-century.

"But other than people devoted to anthropology and archaeology, it caused barely a ripple," Ladd said.