And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.

September 20, 2010 7:37 PM

The entire assemblage comprises 14,882 human skeletal fragments, as well as the mutilated remains of dogs and other animals killed at the massacre site -- Sacred Ridge, southwest of Durango, Colo. [....] 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. [....] At least two other separate studies have come to similar conclusions, suggesting the genocide victims at Sacred Ridge belonged to an ethnic group that was different from that of other nearby populations.

posted by orthogonality (45 comments total)

Look at these assholes.
posted by MrMoonPie at 7:49 PM on September 20, 2010

This is inconvenient.
posted by LarryC at 7:56 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

Sacred Ridge was an inside job.
posted by hanoixan at 7:56 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

"What we can learn from Sacred Ridge is that archaeological sites are not simply piles of rock and refuse, but that they were occupied by people that were involved in complex webs of social relations," Chuipka said. "Sacred Ridge is a case where social relations melted down and the solution chosen was absolute and shocking."

We've always googled Ron Paul, clearly.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:58 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

LarryC: This is inconvenient.

How, and for whom, is it inconvenient?
posted by pts at 8:09 PM on September 20, 2010

why the dogs?
posted by clavdivs at 8:09 PM on September 20, 2010

"an ethnic group that was different from that of other nearby populations." (a direct quote from the article)

from the link, the subhead reads

"Physical traces of ethnic cleansing that took place in the early 800s suggest the massacre was an inside job."

The copy in the piece which gives rise to the subhead is

"Based on the archaeological findings, which include two-headed axes that tested positive for human blood, co-authors Jason Chuipka and James Potter believe the genocide occurred as a result of conflict between different Anasazi Ancestral Puebloan ethnic groups.

'It was entirely an inside job,' Chuipka, an archaeologist with Woods Canyon Archaeological Consultants, told Discovery News."

I find this confusing.
posted by mwhybark at 8:12 PM on September 20, 2010 [3 favorites]

Any indication of how many individuals they're talking about here? I'd like to read the journal article -- this is a pretty slim summary.
posted by Devils Rancher at 8:13 PM on September 20, 2010

mwhybark: I find this confusing.

I believe the "inside job" tagline results from the sad fact that even "science" writers are not immune from putting all Native Americans in the same cultural/historical basket.
posted by Room 101 at 8:16 PM on September 20, 2010 [6 favorites]

Does this warrant an investigation by a Congressional Committee? or are they doing real shit these days?
posted by Bathtub Bobsled at 8:17 PM on September 20, 2010

Terrible.

Cue clueless people amazed that yes, there were many nations here, and many at war with each other, and no, they were just people, real people, with all the strengths and flaws of people and not caricatures who sang songs to nature and waited to "pass on the land" to the white man, etc.

Also cue racists who will then attempt to wave this around whenever the genocide of the Americas is brought up, sort of like the "Black people enslaved each other!" argument that comes up anytime we talk about American slavery...
posted by yeloson at 8:24 PM on September 20, 2010 [15 favorites]

Is this a surprise to anyone? War Before Civilization documents such behaviors among even more ancient and non-agrarian civilizations.

I'm curious about how their diet was different though...agronomist with one-track mind here.
posted by melissam at 8:26 PM on September 20, 2010

"I find this confusing."

He's saying that the killers belonged to the same (Anasazi) culture, but were ethnically distinct from their victims. At least two groups lived the same way in that area, making the same kind of buildings and whatnot, until one group eliminated the other. It doesn't say how distinct the victim group was, so they could have been a large clan with the killers their cousins, or they could have been totally distinct groups that just happened to share a culture.
posted by Kevin Street at 8:30 PM on September 20, 2010 [3 favorites]

This explains all those cliff ladder and tunnel entrances in Mesa Verde.
posted by Brian B. at 8:35 PM on September 20, 2010

We've always googled Ron Paul, clearly.

Heh, it's ironic, because Ron Paul was the candidate who wanted to stop invading and murdering people from other cultures, and instead we voted in someone who did.
posted by shii at 8:57 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

"The individuals at Sacred Ridge whose remains were disarticulated and processed were not a random selection from among the overall population of Ridges Basin," McClelland determined. "In addition to the biological differences, they appear to have had a somewhat different diet and may have experienced a higher level of juvenile growth disruption."
posted by rosswald at 9:01 PM on September 20, 2010

Ron Paul was the candidate who wanted to stop invading and murdering people from other cultures

You're completely right, sorry. I meant to suggest that Paul and his more stringent followers would like to dehumanize specific groups of people within our own culture, which, as these historical situations so often do, invariably leads to a genocidal result analogous to what is described in the OP's link.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:10 PM on September 20, 2010 [3 favorites]

I grew up near Mesa Verde. This is pretty big news. The Anasazi were a people who essentially disappeared without a trace. Many scholars felt a drought caused them to leave. But this evidence suggests perhaps they were murdered by another group in the region as they sought other places to settle down.

Sacred Ridge is about 40 miles to the east of Mesa Verde and closer to Durango, which has a large river and is a lot closer to the mountains and hence gets more rain. This would be a natural place for groups living in a drought would go - it is a remarkable difference in only 40 miles.

I'm only speculating but it is possible one group of Puebloan peoples lived at Mesa Verde and one group lived closer to Durango. They may have had differences and possible fights over territory. Who knows?

And the fact that some Puebloan peoples may have killed other Puebloan peoples is not outside the realm of possibility. I mean in the last few years the Rwandans and the former Yugoslavians attempted to do the same thing. It's human nature. Who cares if someone wants to make a racist thing of it. It's history.
posted by Rashomon at 9:18 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Any indication of how many individuals they're talking about here?

The article says "14,882 human skeletal fragments". Look, I think this is a terrible thing to have happened, but to use the word "genocide" so easily and so many times in the article kind of diminishes the actual meaning of the word. "Slaughter", "massacre", "annihilate", maybe, but genocide is a pretty specific sort of crime, like when you try to wipe out an entire race of people.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:20 PM on September 20, 2010 [3 favorites]

Any indication of how many individuals they're talking about here?

I have the same question. 14,882 human skeletal fragments equals how many whole individuals?
posted by esome at 9:39 PM on September 20, 2010

14,882 human skeletal fragments equals how many whole individuals?

Well, 14,882 ÷ 206 bones in an adult human = 72 complete skeletons.

So no more than seventy-two whole individuals.
posted by lazenby at 9:55 PM on September 20, 2010

No less than 72 whole individuals. The fragments may be incomplete sets.
posted by mazola at 10:05 PM on September 20, 2010 [3 favorites]

But the skeletons might not all be complete, so we can't really say how many people there were. The scientists who did the study may have put a lot of them together, but some pieces may be too damaged to match up, or there might be missing parts that were taken by predators, or who knows what. The time span between then and now is so great it probably introduces uncertainties.
posted by Kevin Street at 10:07 PM on September 20, 2010

Skeletal fragments do not mean whole bones so I don't think the number of fragments will help us determine number of individuals.

Though, I too am curious.
posted by Seamus at 10:07 PM on September 20, 2010

Frankly, the cultural and physical genocide (not to mention a shitload of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse) that happened in Canada with regards to our first nations peoples is far more depressing. It's our own little holocaust that we don't like to acknowledge.
posted by 1000monkeys at 10:08 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Skeletal fragments do not mean whole bones so I don't think the number of fragments will help us determine number of individuals.

Not necessarily, it's done "all the time" with accidents, plane crashes, massive earthquakes/floods. You can use certain fragments to estimate the "minimum number of specimens" based on indicators like sexual dichotomy, age, multiple fragments of the same bone (i.e. 14 left patellas = at least 14 individuals), etc.
posted by 1000monkeys at 10:10 PM on September 20, 2010

This explains all those cliff ladder and tunnel entrances in Mesa Verde.

Exactly so. Anyone who has been to Mesa Verde has to recognize that the cliff dwellings were primariily defensive works.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:16 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Hint: I did not find this confusing. I do feel that perhaps the word genocide has been misused here. Please note that the paper's author, not the journalist doing the writeup, is the person who made the unfortunate choice to use the words 'inside job.'

Over twenty years ago, in college, I recall being exposed to the hypothesis that the Anasazi 'disappearance' was a consequence of conquest or conflict and assimilation. I do think it's very interesting to read of archaeological evidence which argues for the systematic destruction of human remains in this context, which (to me) would echo prior evidence for ritual destruction of physical goods associated with a site's residents in precolumbian mesoamerican culture.
posted by mwhybark at 10:28 PM on September 20, 2010

1000monkeys - By "us" I meant mefites conjecturing on the internets. I agree with your statement and am curious as to what the total number is. I expect they will have one eventually.
posted by Seamus at 10:39 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

"genocide is a pretty specific sort of crime, like when you try to wipe out an entire race of people."
Maybe that's what they thought they were doing. Maybe we can calculate that there were only a certain number of individuals but maybe what seems like a small number to us made up a really large portion of the group.
posted by amethysts at 10:49 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Frankly, the cultural and physical genocide (not to mention a shitload of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse) that happened in Canada with regards to our first nations peoples is far more depressing.

They don't belong to "us".
posted by KokuRyu at 11:04 PM on September 20, 2010

!200 years later, that same land is once again occupied mainly by two ethnic groups, and the more numerous and better nourished of these just happens to have a huge advantage in weapons as well, and they work themselves up into greater fury by the day over their dispossession by the less numerous, poorer, and weaker group.
posted by jamjam at 11:34 PM on September 20, 2010

Kevin Street: "But the skeletons might not all be complete, so we can't really say how many people there were. The scientists who did the study may have put a lot of them together, but some pieces may be too damaged to match up, or there might be missing parts that were taken by predators, or who knows what. The time span between then and now is so great it probably introduces uncertainties."

It's not really too big a problem. To a greater or lesser extent, we archaeologists got this.

There's been a tremendous amount of work done in trying to quantify the number of individuals that are represented in a collection of skeletal material. The primary reason for doing so has come out of subsistence studies, in which archaeologists want to determine the number of animals that were hunted or eaten. This might be to get an idea of the size of a group relying on that food, or the amount of meat that might have come off, or ... hell, almost anything. But serious zooarchaeology subsistence studies on bone assemblages have now been undertaken for almost 50 years, so we’ve got a good background on this sort of thing, and the primary quantification/population calculation method is going to rely upon two measurements:

The first is MNI (Minimum Number of Individuals). We know how many bones are in bodies, and so if we find a collection of bones we can tell the bare minimum number of whole bodies that would be required to make up that collection. If you find 2 skulls, but 5 left femurs, you're dealing with at least 5 individuals. The collection might actually represent 7 individuals, but you have no way of knowing that. You settle for the minimum amount of certainty you can. MNI underestimates the number of specimens at a site.

The second is NISP (Number of Identified SPecimens). NISP counts every instance of a bone that it finds – it operates at the bone level, not the individual animal/person level. This can get problematic if you have highly fragmented bones. If you have a femur that is broken in half and you have the distal and proximal ends, but not the center, NISP scores that femur as 2 different bones. Using MNI you would say "Well, I don't know if both ends are from separate femurs, so I better err on the low side and mark it as a single individual." NISP tends to overestimate the number of specimens at a site.

The beautiful thing about employing both these measures in concert is that each works to constrain the other, even with fragmentary bones, and of all the skeletal systems on earth, you better believe that human skeletons (as in this case) are the absolute best known. People are able to make MNI and NISP calculations from relatively small landmarks on bones in order to make estimates of the original population size.

And while I'm no human skeletal analyst, and my megafauna zooarch days tend to be behind me today (alas!), folks who really geek out on these topics have done a lot of research about the time and place for emphasizing MNI vs. emphasizing NISP calculations, and even about whether one is better than the other when bones are highly fragmentary, or when working with different types animals, or even when to know the differences when working with individual bones themselves (e.g., don't use it on ribs but do use it for tibia). It's a helluva thing.

I don't know Jason Chuipka (and his CV isn't available online that I can find, tsk) but I think it's worth keeping in mind that in the US these days, as a result of NAGPRA and changing relations with Native American communities, we try really goddamned hard to not do anything funny with skeletal analyses. And Journal of Anthropological Archaeology's not a bad journal (though I admit they've published a couple articles that gave me the shits, but that's neither here nor there ...) and it's peer-reviewed, so we'll see.

Post-edit, pre-submit update!

The uncorrected proof paper is available. I haven’t had a chance to read it seriously, of course, but I like to think I skim well (thanks, Metafilter!). They collected approximately 15,000 bone fragments, and calculated that at least 35 people were represented here.

Reading their bit about the bone assemblage, two things are a bit worrying to me. First, they felt able to split out the 35-ish person group into a set of 6 age cohorts (Infant, Child, Subadult, Young Adult, Mature Adult, Old Adult) and second, that they split some of the group into male/female. Despite my limited skeletal forensics know-how, I do know that these analyses can be difficult even with relatively complete skeletons.

Unfortunately, their skeletal analyses are all sitting in a grey literature report that’s not on their website, so it would be an effort to track down the original work to judge it. Overall, though, they’ve got a population that was apparently, based on the stratigraphy, killed, butchered (in the literal sense), and deposited at the same time.

Update over!

As for the introduction of uncertainties? Dude. We work on time scales of hundreds to tens of thousands of years, with sketchy data and highly biased samples and try – desperately desperately try! – to pull bigger conclusions about ancient society and past humans. We eat uncertainties for breakfast and shit out conclusions that same night! RAR!!

Seriously, though, uncertainties are a huge part of the job that we've learned to live with. You're almost never going to get a completely certain answer about the past, but through the amassing of tons of data over decades of work, we're at a point we think we can be relatively certain about some things.
posted by barnacles at 12:01 AM on September 21, 2010 [131 favorites]

Bones of contention!
posted by Wolof at 12:55 AM on September 21, 2010

Thank you for the explanation, barnacles. Flagged as fantastic.
posted by jokeefe at 1:00 AM on September 21, 2010

You're completely right, sorry. I meant to suggest that Paul and his more stringent followers would like to dehumanize specific groups of people within our own culture, which, as these historical situations so often do, invariably leads to a genocidal result analogous to what is described in the OP's link.

So now Ron Paul is on the verge of starting a genocide?

On topic this should not be surprising in the least. Humans killing other humans who are different that is.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 1:38 AM on September 21, 2010

This explains all those cliff ladder and tunnel entrances in Mesa Verde.

Some of the small cliff dwellings that you find out in the canyons are even more clearly defensive than the Mesa Verde buildings. It's more than just defensive, actually -- they are the kinds of places you'd only live if all the nicer places had been taken over by cannibals or slavers or something even more horrifying.
posted by Forktine at 2:37 AM on September 21, 2010

"Inside Job" means that members of the community did it to other members of the community, not outside raiders. In a European analogy, the English killed all the Scottsmen in the border town, not the Vikings. You guys seriously over-beanplated that.
posted by Slap*Happy at 5:24 AM on September 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

This is fascinating, frightening stuff. Can human beings ever really rise above their natures? With the coming scarcity of water and food (as projected by scientists studying the potential impact of climate change) I fear we will see this sort of thing happening with greater frequency and on a larger scale.
posted by kinnakeet at 6:05 AM on September 21, 2010

So now Ron Paul is on the verge of starting a genocide?

Well, he wants to kill the Fed, doesn't he?
posted by octobersurprise at 6:17 AM on September 21, 2010

I call that suspicious.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:21 AM on September 21, 2010

I'm neither an anthropologist nor archaeologist, this is all second hand 10-year-old stuff I only sort of remember, so apologies if I get something wrong.

There's been a long-standing debate in anthropology about the nature of the mesa-top and cliff dwellings of the Pueblo Indians in the American southwest. There was a migration of settlements to the mesa-tops at one point (800ish? Not sure.) It's inconvenient living up on a mesa, there's not much water and your hunting and crops are down below. So why go up there? To anyone who looks it's obvious the mesas and cliffs offer more defense. But there hasn't been much archaeological evidence of warfare. The find discussed in this post is pretty unusual compared to the record we have so far.

The question of war among the Pueblo Indians is politically sensitive. The Indians who live today mostly reject the idea of a violent past, and being told your ancestors were cannibalistic ethnic cleansers is offensive to many. The anthropologists I've talked to are also equally sensitive and aware of the cultural issues at play, both in the Indian culture and in their own anthropologist culture. The real limitation is there's just not been much hard scientific data, it's mostly been interpretation. A find of this magnitude could be a big deal.
posted by Nelson at 8:53 AM on September 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

yeloson--now that you have cued in the clueless and the racist finish the thought if you do not mind. I also find the clueless and the racist dangerous. However, I find those who single out certain ethnic groups, and look at history in limited cross sections, equally clueless and just a dangerous. My own observation is that the capacity for inter/intra ethnic violence has very few exceptions. It really does not make much difference if you are European/Caucasian/Asian/Hispanic/Native American/African/Indigenous/etc. History says we are all capable of great deeds and misdeeds.
posted by rmhsinc at 1:05 PM on September 21, 2010

Thanks for the great comment, barnacles.

I haven't really followd this story but over the past decade so this is from memory, but there has been a lot of revisionist work done on the Anasazi, previously thought to be some archetype of utopian peaceful farming communities. A lot of this was based around similar findins to this one of apparently butchered anc cooked human remains, and also human coprolites (feces) which contained human myoglobin, only found in human muscles and suggestive of cannibalism. A lot of this evidence was brought together in a somewhat obnoxious but highly readable book called "Man Corn". One of the nuances on this theory was that it was not just cannibalism but a kind of cannbalistic terrorism: blatant, over the top ultraviolence followed by disrespectful cannibalism and shitting on the meal scraps in order to produce compliance within and between communities. Short of the cannibalism, a fairly modern notion, no?

Another school of thought takes these same lines of evidence and ties them into historically-documented southwestern practices around suppressing witchcraft - the bodies of witches might be pulverized to help control their lingering postmortem power and it was argued this would produce comparable evidence to the cannibalism theory. You can read about this competing explanation here (PDF)

Whether these new findings will tilt the balance of interpretation one way or another I don't know. Short term, there has been a lot of sensationalistic reporting around this over the last decade which has created a whole new set of stereotypes about ignoble savages so really in my mind, the evidentiary bar should be set pretty high.
posted by Rumple at 3:04 PM on September 21, 2010 [3 favorites]

Also, here is a New Yorker profile of the Man Corn author and discussion of the cannibalism hypothesis more generally (PDF)
posted by Rumple at 3:06 PM on September 21, 2010