Monday, September 27, 2010
It turns out that the Pueblo dwellers were genocidal cannibals.
The Indians who built the pueblos are depicted as peace loving farmers who lived in harmony with nature and their neighbors.
In reality they may very well have been cannibals who committed genocide on their neighbors.
...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.
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I find it interesting to think about the ways in which contemporary history contributes to prevailing archaeological hypotheses and interpretations. I personally think it’s very possible that some Ancestral Puebloan people were victims of ethnic cleansing. But would the archaeological community have taken this idea so seriously, had it not been for the intense media coverage of ethnic conflicts and cleansing in places like Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan in recent years?
The vision of an agrarian people living in peaceful harmony with their neighbors was a constant theme of those who wished to promote the idea that pre-Columbian America was an Eden that was spoiled by greedy, polluted, disease ridden Europeans whose object was cultural genocide as a byproduct of a fatally corrupt Western culture. This picture says it all: a tearful “native American” – one with nature – crying for his lost Eden which was destroyed by the white man.
In this case, the Indians were just a useful tool; a club with which to slime Western civilization. I would venture to say that few Indian tears were shed over the bodies and graves of their beaten foes. That is a characteristic almost uniquely found in the West by those who hate Western culture while living as its pampered, cossetted beneficiaries.
Labels: Culture, Liberalism
