Were the Anasazi cannibals?
I don’t think we have a complete answer yet and the debate is often emotionally charged. As I read the professional literature, we can say that at least some of the Anasazi ate human flesh some of the time. It remains unclear how widespread the practice was or what motivated it. Here is where the debate stands. In Man Corn, Christy Turner demonstrated that human remains at some sites were processed the same way as animal remains. His demonstration hinges on two factors: • Human bodies were tossed into “charnel heaps”—piles of discarded bones—and not buried. • Bones in the charnel heaps display cut marks, crushing, burn marks, and “pot polish” from being boiled. These “taphonomic signatures” are identical to marks found on the remains of game animals and, Turner believes, allow us to infer that the bodies were processed as food sources. This much of Turner’s appears undisputable, but our ability to generalize from these findings is open to question. Some people have argued that there is
