The Ash of Ancient Hearths

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by Neil Caudle

ometimes, the treasures of archaeology are solid gold. Sometimes they are dung.

The coprolite—prehistoric excrement—Brian Billman and his colleagues found preserved in the cold ash of a pithouse hearth was, they think, the first ever discovered on a hearth in the American Southwest—with good reason. A hearth was literally and figuratively the center of Anasazi life, and it was almost inconceivable that anyone who had lived in that house would defile it so. For Billman, this coprolite seemed to represent the ultimate insult, the final gesture of contempt.

But he and his colleagues also knew that the coprolite could be a kind of biological time capsule, containing the possibility of direct evidence of consumption of human flesh. So when Richard Marlar, a pathologist from the University of Colorado, took the coprolite into his laboratory, he knew what was at stake. There was no room for ambiguity. As Billman moved on to UNC-Chapel Hill, continuing his analysis of the site, Marlar prepared for his biochemical studies of the coprolite. He needed to find a protein that existed in human muscle and nowhere else, and then an antibody that would identify that protein and nothing else. Simply detecting human DNA in the coprolite would not be sufficient, because the human digestive system sheds and excretes its own cells. So the human DNA would have to come from muscle tissue.

After three years, Marlar found his antibody and tried it with the samples. Sure enough, the coprolite contained human myoglobin, a protein that transports oxygen in muscle cells and is found only in skeletal muscle and the heart. The only way human myoglobin could have found its way into the coprolite is if someone had eaten human flesh. And in this case, flesh seems to have been all that was eaten for at least 12 hours before the final insult dropped onto the hearth. While other human coprolites from the period usually contain starch from meals of maize, along with the fibrous remains of fruits and vegetables, this coprolite showed only meat.

So here at last was the long-awaited evidence. And as work continued in the community, each newly excavated site yielded more broken human bones, more artifacts, more butchering tools with human blood on them.

"We think," Billman says, "that the entire community was extinguished in this event, that everyone was killed, captured, or driven off. There is no evidence that people came back. At other massacre sites, there’s evidence that people came back to the site and cleaned it up and buried people who had been killed and mutilated. In this case, everything was left on the pit-structure floors." The victims seem to have been recent immigrants, and patterns of pottery exchange suggest that the newcomers had no allies in their new home. They may have been isolated and vulnerable.

"The ceramics don’t resemble the ceramics of the Mesa Verde area," Billman says. "A significant percentage look like ceramics from about 60 miles to the south. They’re Anasazi people but they’re from another region. So we think they moved into the Mesa Verde area around 1125 or 1130, established a community, and then were wiped out."

ut who wiped them out, and why? Billman and his collaborators considered various explanations. The site was a few miles south of the border between farmers and hunter-gatherers, so it was conceivable that hunters from the north had raided the community for food. But the M.O., in this case, didn’t seem to match hunter-gatherer behavior. So the team also considered the possibility that the attackers were neighbors. A day’s walk from Billman’s research site, researchers had uncovered what Billman calls "a potential perpetrators’ site." Here, tool-marked human bones appeared in trash deposits, not on the floors of houses—as if the occupants had brought their victims in to be killed and eaten, then tossed their remains away with the trash.

"So there is one line of evidence—not real solid—pointing in the direction that it was other groups, other Anasazi in the area," Billman says.

The raid had the earmarks of a territorial conflict, a purge. At the time, having extra territory may have meant survival. Tree-ring records indicate that the period from about 1150 to about 1200 suffered the second-worst drought in the last 2,000 years. The drier the climate, the more land required to grow food.

And the Mesa Verde area wasn’t the only region under pressure. Globally, times were tough. The onset of the "little Ice Age" brought climatic changes that threatened human survival in many parts of the world. While the Plague decimated Europe, major population centers in the Americas fell apart. In Chaco Canyon, about 150 miles to the south of the Mesa Verde area, a stronghold of Anasazi culture collapsed, scattering its population across the Southwest.

"So you have thousands of people moving around, looking for places to settle and raise crops," Billman says. "The people of the Mesa Verde region, in some places, may have turned to a strategy of raiding and cannibalism as a means of intimidating people, of keeping people out."

While climate stress may help explain why cannibalism flared up in the last half of the twelfth century, it doesn’t explain why it stopped. When a second severe drought struck during the late 1200s, raiding resumed but cannibalism apparently did not. This is the mystery that interests Billman most.

"After 1200, there may be one or two cases of it, over the next 500 years," Billman says, "but there’s basically very little evidence of cannibalism among historic Puebloan people, or any other people in the Southwest area. Somehow, this group of people figured out a way to end this particular form of terrorism and violence. Today, Cannibalism is something Puebloan people regard with contempt. It is one of their strongest taboos."

Billman regards this as a significant accomplishment, one that not every culture has managed on its own. "In the South Pacific—in highland New Guinea or Fiji, for example—cannibalism continued until Western pacification, when outsiders began to police it," he says.

illman understands why today’s Puebloan people become upset when they hear about the findings from Cowboy Wash, but he is baffled by some of the outrage he’s heard from other quarters. A response to his paper in American Antiquity went so far as to suggest that the research would aid and abet racism and genocide.

He shakes his head. "What do they want us to do? Just flat out ignore these things? I don’t have a particularly pessimistic view of human nature, but I think I’ve got my eyes open. I’ve lived in the twentieth century. Wherever archaeologists work, if they work there long enough they’re going to find evidence of human violence. Recently, there have been finds of Neanderthal cannibalism in Europe. Cannibalism has been practiced around the world for a variety of reasons. In some cultures, it’s a form of ancestor worship. Our medieval ancestors practiced cannibalism for medical purposes.

"So, as archaeologists, we face a question: Are we going to present a sanitized view of the human past, or are we going to directly confront what people have done?"

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