For nearly 30 years, University of Arizona physical anthropologist Christy Turner and his late wife, Jacqueline, studied human bones from the Anasazi culture in the Four Corners—sites including Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and many less-famous locales. The pattern they began to see was not the familiar park ranger story of peaceful farmers. Instead the bones revealed signs of violent death: warfare and cannibalism.
Man Corn, a literal translation of the Aztec word for a sacred meal of sacrificed human meat cooked with corn, is a comprehensive report on this research. The Turners examine 76 Anasazi sites in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah, most of which exhibit signs of cannibalism—not isolated survival cannibalism by the starving, such as the Donner party of California, but systematic ritual cannibalism of the type that was common in Mesoamerica.
For years, many Four Corners archaeologists have concluded that widespread warfare and violence were a consequence of the Anasazi collapses of the 12th and 14th centuries. But ritual cannibalism is another story, one that is wrought with political and scientific controversy. For example, the Polacca Wash site near Hopi produced at least 30 individuals that the Turners believe were cannibalized. The bones dated to a.d. 1580 ±95, which put them in the era of Spanish conquest. Yet the Spaniards, coming from Aztec Mexico and expecting to find cannibals in the Southwest, found no trace whatsoever. Could there be another explanation?
Even more bewildering is the authors’ proposed explanation that cannibalism among the Anasazi was introduced by a small, well-organized force of Toltecs from present-day Mexico. For years a few archaeologists have tried to tie the Chaco phenomenon to Mexico and the Toltecs, without much success.
This volume is a scientific report and not easy reading for the layperson, but it is sure to be one of the most controversial books on Southwestern archaeology of our generation. —Mark Michel
