The Terrifying Final Days of the Anasazi

Ancestral Pueblans of the U.S. Four Corners region weren’t so peaceful after all

Pueblo Bonito in winter. Image courtesy of Chaco Canyon National Historic Park.

Until they vanished around 1150 CE, the Anasazi — known by anthropologists as Ancestral Pueblans — thrived in the arid American Southwest for over eight centuries. Much of what they left behind are grand monuments to humanity — such as Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon — which contains 800 rooms and required more than 30,000 tons of sandstone block to build. They also left pottery, tools, and bones — lots of bones, and these bones have led to some amazing findings.

Until recently, everything we had learned about this culture pointed toward an almost utopian society. The Anasazi, the traditional view held, had no absolute rulers, or even a ruling class, but governed themselves through consensus, as the Pueblo Indians do today. They were a society without rich or poor. Warfare and violence were rare, or perhaps unknown. The Anasazi were believed to be profoundly spiritual, and to live in harmony with nature.

This was the thinking until Christy J. Turner II of Arizona State University released his 1999 book Man Corn (the literal way that Nahuatl speakers express the concept of cannibalism). The book is the culmination of decades of archeological work, which began around when he first spoke about his theory in 1969, based on a finding of a collection of smashed up human bones from the Hopi reservation. Turner called the talk “A Massacre at Hopi” and in it, he theorized that the bones were left over from a massive homicidal event and subsequent cannibalistic feast took place at a sacred place called Death Mound. The Navajo and Hopi reject his theories to this day, but many scholars still ask, why did this peaceful culture turn to something as brutal as cannibalism? Turner feels that it was for terror and control.

“Sacred Ridge is on the far end of the conflict spectrum where social relations completely melt down.”

Now emerging evidence from Kristen Kuckelman, Ricky Lightfoot and Debra Martinseems to show that the Anasazi were even less peaceful than even Turner believes. Their team has found evidence that they were only cannibals, but that a full-on cannibalistic war was waged. Not only that, many victims may have been murdered during witch trials, and then eaten as meat. They also note a massive uptick of violence and cannibalism around 1150, as Meso-American terrorist invaders moved north into the present day Four Corners region. This is the year when archeologists propose that the Anasazi culture suffered complete collapse, exacerbated by an extaordinarily long drought period.

But the most recent evidence points to genocide as the cause of the fall of the Anasazi culture. Based on archeology performed at a place called Sacred Ridge, Jason Potter and James Chuipka think that around the year 800, two or more groups of Ancestral Pueblans turned on one another, resulting in a mass casualty event. They found almost 15,000 human skull fragments, thousands of other bones, and weapons, such as a two-headed axe that tested positive for human blood. They believe this violent event was followed by the destruction of the victims’ homes and belongings.

“Sacred Ridge is on the far end of the conflict spectrum where social relations completely melt down,” Potter says, mentioning that the Sacred Ridge “occupants were targeted to take the blame.”

Chuipka and Potter analyzed objects excavated at Sacred Ridge, which was a multiple habitation site of 22 pit structures, some of which may have operated as communal ritual facilities for a population that extended beyond the immediate site inhabitants. This suggests the residents at one point exerted some social control in the area.

The unearthed bones and artifacts indicate that when the violence took place, men, women and children were tortured, disemboweled, killed and often hacked to bits. In some cases, heads, hands and feet appear to have been removed as trophies for the killers. The attackers then removed belongings out of the structures and set the roofs on fire.

“I think that the major event was preceded by social stress within the community that may have been exacerbated by a period of drought,” Chuipka said. “The scale of the mutilations suggests that it was planned and organized in the preceding days or weeks, and that the violence took place in a relatively short period of time — a few days.”

“All evidence points to a rapid event, which is only possible with coordination and complicity within the community,” he added.

The researchers ruled out other possible explanations, such as starvation cannibalism, traditional preparation of the deceased, and even individuals targeted for practicing witchcraft. Cannibalism, for example, usually involves bone marrow processing, which was found at the Hopi Death Mound by Christy Turner. Witch roundups, Chiupka points out, tend to affect a relatively small number of victims, so that doesn’t fit with what was found at Sacred Ridge either.

Why the Anasazi left their massive houses and kivas and vanished is still a mystery, but it seems that this allegedly peaceful culture was anything but — at least in its final years, when all hell broke loose amongst these egalitarian farmers.

You can visit the Chaco Canyon Historical Park in New Mexico and Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, amongst many other locations in the U.S. Southwest, to see the incredible houses and ritual spaces left behind by the Ancestral Pueblans.