The Ash of Ancient Hearths

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by Neil Caudle

hen we found broken bone, I said, 'This isn't going to be the usual pithouse site,'" Billman remembers. "You just don't normally find broken human bone on a pit-structure floor. We told the tribal leaders this immediately."

And so, at that moment back in 1997, the tribe could have said "Stop," could have turned away and left well enough alone. After all, this was their project, their land. But instead, they said, "Go ahead." Terry Knight, a tribal leader who administered the contract and oversaw work at the site for the Ute Mountain Utes, has been quoted as saying that he hoped the research would help anthropologists revise an overly simplistic view of complex Native American cultures. He wanted the truth.

It was not a pleasant truth. In a cluster of three neighboring pithouse sites lay more than 1,000 broken bits of human bone. The fragments had belonged to at least seven human beings—men, women, and children. Several of the bones bore the mark of stone tools, the grooves where someone had cut through the tendon and peeled back the flesh. Joints of bone had been charred at both ends from the coals. Skulls had been broken and roasted. Pieces of bone showed "pot polish," smoothed from having been stirred in a pot.

The evidence of this crime scene, sealed tight by flash floods that had plugged the pithouse with sediment, was remarkably complete. For Billman, it was a rare chance to reopen a moment in time.

"Most archaeological sites we study are built up over generations of occupation, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years," he says. "So you have to consider averages. We don't see the behavior of any specific individual or event. We see the result of the behavior of many people over long periods of time. In this case, we have this scene, this moment, with very little subsequent disturbance at the site."

As the evidence emerged from the soil, Billman could see that it would not be telling a story about last-resort cannibalism—the necessary sacrifice of a few to feed a starving many. In starvation cases, mature men and young children tend to die first, over a prolonged period. At this site, there was no such pattern. The victims had died suddenly, probably within hours or days of one another, and they seemed to have been part of an extended family, including children, adolescents, and mature adults. Patricia Lambert, a bioarchaeologist from Utah State University, helped the team reconstruct, in minute detail, the victims' fate. Yes, the killers processed their victims for food, just as they would have game animals. But deer and elk did not endure the kind of brutality Lambert was finding in her studies of the human victims. Here were people who had been maimed and battered, their faces crushed, their teeth broken out. For the research team, this scene wasn't about witchcraft or ancestor worship, both of which had been proposed to explain other episodes of cannibalism in the Southwest. And it wasn't about the desperate need for food. It was about violence, sudden and extreme.

s the team carefully analyzed the contents of each pithouse, evidence mounted in extraordinary detail.

"In addition to finding the body parts of these seven individuals, we also found a full range of domestic artifacts that had been left in place—things like bowls, a cooking pot, jars, stone tools, and grinding tools," Billman says. "We found two stone tools that had blood residue on them—human blood residue—tools that were probably used in the processing of the human remains. The hearths were overflowing with ash from the last cooking. There were ash dumps adjacent to hearths where so much cooking had been done that the hearths were cleaned out and then refired and then burned until they overflowed again with ash, all in the same short time. There were ornaments that were probably on the bodies of the people who had been consumed."

While all of this added up to a strong circumstantial case for cannibalism, Billman and his colleagues knew that skeptics would not be convinced unless they built an air-tight case. Traces of human blood on the shards of a cooking pot were compelling, but not in themselves conclusive.

Billman had heard for years the contentious debate over cannibalism in the Southwest. Beginning in the mid 1960s, Christy Turner of Arizona State University and his late wife, Jacqueline Turner, had been assembling evidence about the practice, but their work had met resistance and disbelief. More than once, academics had declared that the evidence for cannibalism was shaky and unconvincing. Even in 1992, when Tim White of Berkeley published an exhaustively detailed book about cannibalism at Anasazi sites from Mancos, a small pueblo on the Colorado Plateau, a few critics continued to doubt. And so while Billman knew that many archaeologists working in the Southwest were ready to accept the evidence he and his colleagues were about to reveal, he also knew that others would not.

"There are a few archaeologists who have staked a significant part of their careers on saying that this doesn’t exist," Billman says.

The debate was distracting and divisive, and he knew it would go on and on unless there was direct, incontestable evidence of the consumption of human flesh. But what sort of direct evidence could they find?

Next: the long-awaited evidence

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