Sacred Ridge

Durango, Colorado

The best-known of the various instances of alleged cannibalism in the prehistoric Southwest are a set of several that occurred around AD 1150 in the area around the modern town of Cortez, Colorado.  There are also scattered examples of similar assemblages dating to both before and after this and located both in southwestern Colorado and elsewhere, but most of them are not as well documented and they are therefore not easily comparable to the well-known assemblages.  One exception, so far the only known example of possible cannibalism dating to the period in the late thirteenth century when the Four Corners region was abandoned, is Castle Rock Pueblo at Canyons of the Ancients National Monument west of Cortez.  Earlier assemblages, in particular, are very rare, and the few known are generally not very well documented at all.  Cannibalism has thus generally been discussed in the literature as something that appears rather suddenly in the Southwestern archaeological record around 1150, perhaps indicating Mesoamerican influence that may or may not have had something to do with the rise and fall of the regional system centered on Chaco Canyon between about AD 1030 and 1130.  There have been some scattered references in the literature to earlier instances, but without good documentation they have not gotten much attention compared to the later ones.

That may now change, however.  An article published very recently reports on an astonishing assemblage recently documented in detail at Sacred Ridge, part of Ridges Basin south of Durango, Colorado (east of Cortez).  This site dates to around AD 700 to 800, during the Pueblo I period.  As part of salvage excavations in preparation for a reservoir project in the basin, archaeologists discovered one of the largest assemblages of intensively processed human remains known from the Southwest.  At least 35 people were represented in the assemblage, although the actual number present is exceptionally difficult to determine because the remains were fragmented to an enormous degree even compared to other heavily processed assemblages.   The ages of identifiable individuals ranged from infancy to adulthood.  The conditions of the deposition of the remains indicates that most were processed, possibly in connection with cannibalism, then dumped into one of the residential pithouses at the site.  Several artifacts found associated with the remains tested positive for human hemoglobin and/or myoglobin, indicating that they had come into contact with human blood and/or muscle tissue.

Francisco's Restaurante y Cantina, Durango, Colorado

This is a very large assemblage.  The well-documented assemblage at site 5MT10010 at Cowboy Wash, for example, consisted of only 7 individuals, and the other three sites in the Cowboy Wash community that have been excavated (all of which also showed evidence of cannibalism) ranged from 2 to 13 individuals.  Castle Rock had at least 41 individuals, but that was a large, aggregated community from a later period when the regional population was both larger and more concentrated in aggregated sites.  Finding 35 people killed at a Pueblo I village is extraordinary.

So who were these people?  The circumstances of the assemblage suggest that they were probably the inhabitants of the Sacred Ridge site, which contained several residential pithouses and constituted a relatively large portion of the overall Ridges Basin community.  Biometric analyses of the remains suggested that the individuals in the assemblage were both related to each other and distinct from the other people in the community.  This raises the possibility that they were recent immigrants who had attempted to move into the area, perhaps at a time when environmental conditions were difficult and some parts of the region had become less suitable for habitation, forcing their inhabitants to move into already-occupied areas where the local residents may not have been friendly.  This is similar to what some have proposed for Cowboy Wash, where ceramics indicate that the residents had strong ties to the Chuska Mountain region to the south and may have been recent immigrants into an area where they were not welcome.  The early AD 800s, when the Sacred Ridge massacre apparently occurred, does indeed seem to have been a time of difficult environmental conditions, as was the mid-1100s when the well-known cannibalism events such as the one at Cowboy Wash occurred.  The migration hypothesis thus seems fairly plausible to explain Sacred Ridge.

Railroad Station, Durango, Colorado

Not so fast, however.  In addition to doing the biometric analyses, the researchers in this case also did strontium analyses of the tooth enamel found in the assemblage.  Strontium isotope analyses can be used to determine where a person (or a tree) lived, which makes this type of analysis a useful way to directly test migration hypotheses.  Tooth enamel has a strontium ratio that reflects where a person lived as a child, since enamel is preserved throughout life after initially forming in childhood.  The strontium ratio of bone, on the other hand, reflects where a person lived shortly before death, since bone cells are continually being replaced throughout life.  In this case only tooth enamel was tested, but I’ve seen other studies comparing tooth and bone enamel to determine if a person lived in the same place at the beginning and end of life, which is just about the best way to test a migration hypothesis that I can imagine.  In the case of Sacred Ridge only tooth enamel was analyzed for some reason, but it still provides a way to determine if the individuals at Sacred Ridge had grown up in the Ridges Basin area or had moved at some point in their lives from somewhere else.

What the analysis showed was that all the analyzed individuals had likely grown up either in the immediate Ridges Basin area or nearby.  None could be conclusively identified as having grown up anywhere else.  This effectively falsifies the immigration hypothesis and requires a different explanation for the massacre.  It appears that the people who lived at Sacred Ridge were both local to Ridges Basin and distinct from the other inhabitants of the area, which the authors interpret as an “ethnic” difference.  They point to a variety of other indications in architecture and material culture suggesting that the area was quite diverse ethnically during this period, and they argue that the massacre represents ethnic violence within the community during a period of environmental deterioration likely leading to social stress.  The inhabitants of Sacred Ridge appear to have had greater access to large game animals than other members of the community, which may indicate that they were relatively well-off compared to others, who may have become resentful when times turned bad and taken out their frustrations through intensive violence, possibly involving cannibalism, which may have been so intense in part as an attempt to erase the identity of the victimized group.  The authors run through and discount a number of other explanations that have been offered for cannibalism assemblages, including warfare, social control, starvation, and witchcraft execution.  They reject these based on specific criteria they identify as the plausible archaeological correlates of each theory.  The specific correlates they offer strike me as dubious, and they do acknowledge that their “ethnic violence” theory is not necessarily incompatible with some of the others, but the approach is interesting.

Gaslight Theater, Durango, Colorado

There has been a recent trend in Southwestern archaeology toward trying to reconstruct ethnicity in the archaeological record, and there is an increasing sense that the Southwestern past may have been much more diverse ethnically than archaeologists have often assumed.  This paper takes that trend in an interesting direction by combining it with the contemporaneous trend toward greater interest in violence and warfare in the prehistoric Southwest.  The authors suggest that some of the later cannibalism assemblages might be profitably reexamined with the ethnic violence idea in mind, which is a good idea.  That said, “ethnicity” is a problematic concept when it comes to archaeological data, which is necessarily material in nature and not necessarily reflective of such an abstract concept.  It would be unreasonable to expect a short paper like this to address the issue at length, of course, and it appears that other publications from this project deal with it in more detail.  The innovative use of biodistance and strontium analyses to address these issues is a worthwhile development regardless of whether the trends identified correspond to ethnicity, however, and this paper makes for a very interesting contribution to the literature on violence and cannibalism in the Southwest that may require some adjustments to existing theories.

Potter, J., & Chuipka, J. (2010). Perimortem mutilation of human remains in an early village in the American Southwest: A case for ethnic violence Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 29 (4), 507-523 DOI: 10.1016/j.jaa.2010.08.001