Friday, November 18, 2005

Mayan War Crimes

Yesterday's LA Times and NY Times each had pieces on a spectacular archaeological find in the Classic Mayan site of Cancuen in Guatemala. Arthur Demarest, an archaeologist from Vanderbilt University, and his team are excavating there and found evidence of a great battle for the city around the year AD 800. Cancuen was taken by invaders and Demarest found evidence that the ruling elite of the city were all murdered. He found the king and queen in a shallow grave and the remains of another 31 members of the royal family smashed and dismembered and thrown into a cistern.

This picture from the LA Times shows weapons, mutilated long bones, and two pieced-together smashed crania from the cistern. The article states that this massacre was a pivotal event in the Classic Maya Collapse. This is one of the Great Questions in Archaeology - why were numerous Mayan cities abandoned in the early Ninth Century AD - that researchers have been chewing on for generations. It remains to be seen if the sack and abandonment of Cancuen is a pivotal event in this much larger phenomenon, but it is an exciting and significant find in any event.

In the course of our work we occasionaly find horrific epsiodes like this "frozen in time" as the LA Times article says. I found evidence of a minor one in my thesis research, three bodies dumped in a kiva ventilator shaft in an Anasazi site that I posted about here last month. After reading about this discovery yesterday, two other North American examples immediately came to mind.

The first was a find at another Anasazi site, the Salmon Ruin, located near Bloomfield, NM. Cynthia Irwin-Williams and her team found the remains of 35 small children and two adults in the burned roof-fall of a tower kiva excavated there. I visited the Salmon Ruin during a conference that was held in the area shortly after the find was made and saw the burned tower kiva. The fire was so hot that some of the adobe had glazed like ceramics. There was plenty of other evidence that the pueblo had been attacked and sacked sometime in the AD 1260s, and the interpretation was that the children and two baby-sitters had been sent to the roof as a place of refuge and they had burned to death in the fires that accompanied the attack.

While doing a little research to refresh my memory on this I found that Christy Turner had reanalyzed the collection and reported on it in his book Man Corn that I posted on here. The results of his work are even more chilling than the original theory. Turner found that the two adults had been dismembered, butchered, and the remains were widely spread. The childrens' remains showed no sign of this and were clustered together. So after the adults were butchered and cannibalized, they were strewn on the roof. Then the children, dead or alive we do not know, were put there in a group and the roof torched. A horrid story.

The second example comes from a site in South Dakota that I originally heard reported in a presentation at the Plains Conference. The Crow Creek site is a Middle Missouri village located on the Missouri River in the central part of the state. Villages of this type and time period (Fourteenth Century AD) were composed of large earthlodges surrounded by a palisade and moat. The excavations at Crow Creek showed that the village had been burned and sacked around the year AD 1325.

Apparently everyone in the village was killed and thrown into the moat where they were covered and preserved by natural burial. Almost 500 people of both sexes and all ages were heaped there as you can see in this image from a University of South Dakota website where you can read more about it. This horrifying example of ethnic cleansing was a scientific bonanza, as it gave the entire contemporaneous population of the village to the physical anthropologists who studied it. Plains archaeologists are accustomed to digging bone beds, but they are usually bison and not human.

Arthur Demarest and I were undergraduate classmates at Tulane. Arthur was always very sharp, and has gone on to a stellar career with lots of solid contributions like this one. I saw him a couple of months ago on a show on the History Channel, and it was evident that he has certainly gained lots of skills as a showman since we took Mayan Archaeology together from Bob Wauchope.

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