Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (28 page)

tion sizes arise frequently in archaeology, as discussed for Easter Island and
the Maya in other chapters of this book.

Whatever the number, this dense population could no longer support it
self but was subsidized by outlying satellite settlements constructed in simi
lar architectural styles and joined to Chaco Canyon by a radiating regional
network of hundreds of miles of roads that are still visible today. Those out
liers had dams to catch rain, which fell unpredictably and very patchily: a thunderstorm might produce abundant rain in one desert wash and no rain in another wash just a mile away. The dams meant that when a particular wash was fortunate enough to receive a rainstorm, much of the rainwater
became stored behind the dam, and people living there could quickly plant
crops, irrigate, and grow a huge surplus of food at that wash in that year.
The surplus could then feed people living at all the other outliers that didn't
happen to receive rain then.

Chaco Canyon became a black hole into which goods were imported but from which nothing tangible was exported. Into Chaco Canyon came: those
tens of thousands of big trees for construction; pottery (all late-period pot
tery in Chaco Canyon was imported, probably because exhaustion of local
firewood supplies precluded firing pots within the canyon itself); stone of
good quality for making stone tools; turquoise for making ornaments, from
other areas of New Mexico; and macaws, shell jewelry, and copper bells
from the Hohokam and from Mexico, as luxury goods. Even food had to be
imported, as shown by a recent study tracing the origins of corncobs exca
vated from Pueblo Bonito by means of the same strontium isotope method
used by Nathan English to trace the origins of Pueblo Bonito's wooden
beams. It turns out that, already in the 9th century, corn was being imported from the Chuska Mountains 50 miles to the west (also one of the
two sources of roof beams), while a corncob from the last years of Pueblo
Bonito in the 12th century came from the San Juan River system 60 miles to
the north.

Chaco society turned into a mini-empire, divided between a well-fed
elite living in luxury and a less well-fed peasantry doing the work and rais
ing the food. The road system and the regional extent of standardized archi
tecture testify to the large size of the area over which the economy and
culture of Chaco and its outliers were regionally integrated. Styles of build
ings indicate a three-step pecking order: the largest buildings, so-called
Great Houses, in Chaco Canyon itself (residences of the governing chiefs?);
outlier Great Houses beyond the canyon ("provincial capitals" of junior
chiefs?); and small homesteads of just a few rooms (peasants' houses?).

Compared to smaller buildings, the Great Houses were distinguished by
finer construction with veneer masonry, large structures called Great Kivas
used for religious rituals (similar to ones still used today in modern Pueb
los), and a higher ratio of storage space to total space. Great Houses far ex
ceeded homesteads in their contents of imported luxury goods, such as the
turquoise, macaws, shell jewelry, and copper bells mentioned above, plus
imported Mimbres and Hohokam pottery. The highest concentration of
luxury items located to date comes from Pueblo Bonito's room number 33,
which held burials of 14 individuals accompanied by 56,000 pieces of
turquoise and thousands of shell decorations, including one necklace of
2,000 turquoise beads and a basket covered with a turquoise mosaic and
filled with turquoise and shell beads. As for evidence that the chiefs ate bet
ter than did the peasants, garbage excavated near Great Houses contained a higher proportion of deer and antelope bones than did garbage from home
steads, with the result that human burials indicate taller, better-nourished,
less anemic people and lower infant mortality at Great Houses.

Why would outlying settlements have supported the Chaco center, duti
fully delivering timber, pottery, stone, turquoise, and food without receiving
anything material in return? The answer is probably the same as the reason
why outlying areas of Italy and Britain today support our cities such as
Rome and London, which also produce no timber or food but serve as po
litical and religious centers. Like the modern Italians and British, Chacoans
were now irreversibly committed to living in a complex, interdependent society. They could no longer revert to their original condition of self-
supporting mobile little groups, because the trees in the canyon were gone,
the arroyos were cut below field levels, and the growing population had
filled up the region and left no unoccupied suitable areas to which to move. When the pinyon and juniper trees were cut down, the nutrients in the litter
underneath the trees were flushed out. Today, more than 800 years later,
there is still no pinyon/juniper woodland growing anywhere near the pack-
rat middens containing twigs of the woodland that had grown there before
a.d.
1000. Food remains in rubbish at archaeological sites attest to the growing problems of the canyon's inhabitants in nourishing themselves:
deer declined in their diets, to be replaced by smaller game, especially rabbits and mice. Remains of complete headless mice in human coprolites (preserved dry feces) suggest that people were catching mice in the fields,
beheading them, and popping them in whole.

The last identified construction at Pueblo Bonito, dating from the decade
after 1110, was from a wall of rooms enclosing the south side of the plaza,
which had formerly been open to the outside. That suggests strife: people
were evidently now visiting Pueblo Bonito not just to participate in its reli
gious ceremonies and to receive orders, but also to make trouble. The last tree-ring-dated roof beam at Pueblo Bonito and at the nearby Great House of Chetro Ketl was cut in
a.d.
1117, and the last beam anywhere in Chaco
Canyon in
a.d.
1170. Other Anasazi sites show more abundant evidence of strife, including signs of cannibalism, plus Kayenta Anasazi settlements at the tops of steep cliffs far from fields and water and understandable only as easily defended locations. At those southwestern sites that outlasted Chaco and survived until after
a.d.
1250, warfare evidently became intense, as re
flected in a proliferation of defensive walls and moats and towers, clustering
of scattered small hamlets into larger hilltop fortresses, apparently deliber
ately burned villages containing unburied bodies, skulls with cut marks
caused by scalping, and skeletons with arrowheads inside the body cavity.
That explosion of environmental and population problems in the form of civil unrest and warfare is a frequent theme in this book, both for past so
cieties (the Easter Islanders, Mangarevans, Maya, and Tikopians) and for
modern societies (Rwanda, Haiti, and others).

The signs of warfare-related cannibalism among the Anasazi are an
interesting story in themselves. While everyone acknowledges that canni
balism may be practiced in emergencies by desperate people, such as the
Donner Party trapped by snow at Donner Pass en route to California in the
winter of 1846-47, or by starving Russians during the siege of Leningrad
during World War II, the existence of non-emergency cannibalism is controversial. In fact, it was reported in hundreds of non-European societies at
the times when they were first contacted by Europeans within recent centuries. The practice took two forms: eating either the bodies of enemies killed in war, or else eating one's own relatives who had died of natural
causes. New Guineans with whom I have worked over the past 40 years have
matter-of-factly described their cannibalistic practices, have expressed dis
gust at our own Western burial customs of burying relatives without doing them the honor of eating them, and one of my best New Guinean workers
quit his job with me in 1965 in order to partake in the consumption of
his recently deceased prospective son-in-law. There have also been many archaeological finds of ancient human bones in contexts suggestive of
cannibalism.

Nevetheless, many or most European and American anthropologists,
brought up to regard cannibalism with horror in their own societies, are
also horrified at the thought of it being practiced by peoples that they ad
mire and study, and so they deny its occurrence and consider claims of it as
racist slander. They dismiss all the descriptions of cannibalism by non-
European peoples themselves or by early European explorers as unreliable hearsay, and they would evidently be convinced only by a videotape taken
by a government official or, most convincing of all, by an anthropologist.
However, no such tape exists, for the obvious reason that the first Euro
peans to encounter people reported to be cannibals routinely expressed
their disgust at the practice and threatened its practitioners with arrest.

Such objections have created controversy around the many reports of
human remains, with evidence consistent with cannibalism, found at Anasazi sites. The strongest evidence comes from an Anasazi site at which a house and its contents had been smashed, and the scattered bones of seven
people were left inside the house, consistent with their having been killed in a war raid rather than properly buried. Some of the bones had been cracked
in the same way that bones of animals consumed for food were cracked to
extract the marrow. Other bones showed smooth ends, a hallmark of ani
mal bones boiled in pots, but not of ones not boiled in pots. Broken pots
themselves from that Anasazi site had residues of the human muscle protein
myoglobin on the pots' inside, consistent with human flesh having been
cooked in the pots. But skeptics might still object that boiling human meat
in pots, and cracking open human bones, does not prove that other humans
actually consumed the meat of the former owners of those bones (though
why else would they go to all that trouble of boiling and cracking bones to be left scattered on the floor?). The most direct sign of cannibalism at the
site is that dried human feces, found in the house's hearth and still well pre
served after nearly a thousand years in that dry climate, proved to contain
human muscle protein, which is absent from normal human feces, even
from the feces of people with injured and bleeding intestines. This makes it
probable that whoever attacked that site, killed the inhabitants, cracked open their bones, boiled their flesh in pots, scattered the bones, and re
lieved himself or herself by depositing feces in that hearth had actually con
sumed the flesh of his or her victims.

The final blow for Chacoans was a drought that tree rings show to have
begun around
a.d.
1130. There had been similar droughts previously,
around
a.d.
1090 and 1040, but the difference this time was that Chaco
Canyon now held more people, more dependent on outlying settlements,

and with no land left unoccupied. A drought would have caused the
groundwater table to drop below the level where it could be tapped by plant
roots and could support agriculture; a drought would also make rainfall-
supported dryland agriculture and irrigation agriculture impossible. A
drought that lasted more than three years would have been fatal, because
modern Puebloans can store corn for only two or three years, after which it
is too rotten or infested to eat. Probably the outlying settlements that had
formerly supplied the Chaco political and religious centers with food lost faith in the Chacoan priests whose prayers for rain remained unanswered,
and they refused to make more food deliveries. A model for the end of
Anasazi settlement at Chaco Canyon, which Europeans did not observe, is
what happened in the Pueblo Indian revolt of 1680 against the Spaniards,
a revolt that Europeans did observe. As in Chaco Anasazi centers, the
Spaniards had extracted food from local farmers by taxing them, and those food taxes were tolerated until a drought left the farmers themselves short
of food, provoking them to revolt.

Some time between
a.d.
1150 and 1200, Chaco Canyon was virtually abandoned and remained largely empty until Navajo sheepherders reoccu-pied it 600 years later. Because the Navajo did not know who had built the
great ruins that they found there, they referred to those vanished former inhabitants as the Anasazi, meaning "the Ancient Ones." What actually
happened to the thousands of Chacoan inhabitants? By analogy with his
torically witnessed abandonments of other pueblos during a drought in
the 1670s, probably many people starved to death, some people killed each other, and the survivors fled to other settled areas in the Southwest. It must have been a planned evacuation, because most rooms at Anasazi sites lack
the pottery and other useful objects that people would be expected to take
with them in a planned evacuation, in contrast to the pottery still in the rooms of the above-mentioned site whose unfortunate occupants were killed and eaten. The settlements to which Chaco survivors managed to
flee include some pueblos in the area of the modern Zuni pueblos, where
rooms built in a style similar to Chaco Canyon houses and containing
Chaco styles of pottery have been found at dates around the time of Chaco's
abandonment.

Jeff Dean and his colleagues Rob Axtell, Josh Epstein, George Gumer-
man, Steve McCarroll, Miles Parker, and Alan Swedlund have carried out an
especially detailed reconstruction of what happened to a group of about
a thousand Kayenta Anasazi in Long House Valley in northeastern Arizona. They calculated the valley's actual population at various times from