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Show t Ancient Cannibalism on the Kelly Laws Farm, Mustang Mesa All students of Anasazi culture owe a debt of gratitude to Kelly Laws, a Blanding resident who farms on Mustang Mesa. As a result of his decision to cease digging in an Ansazi site which he owns, and notify archaeologists of his findings, an unusual and important episode of Anasazi cannibalism has been documented and added to our body of formal knowledge of Anasazi culture. Laws and his friend, Punk Holliday, were excavating a small Anasazi settlement on the Laws farm in December 1986, when they uncovered an ancient pit filled with what appeared to be the remains of cannibalized humans. Recognizing that this find might be important enough that archaeologists might wish to hear about it, Laws ceased excavating and notified his cousin, Winston Hurst, curator and archaeologist at Edge of the Cedars Museum. Hurst formally recorded the site in January of 1987, and in April described it and the find to his friend and colleague Shane Baker, an archaeologist at Brigham Young University who specializes in the study of human and animal bones. With the help of various fellow archaeologists and interested citizens, Hurst and Baker were able to recover most of the bones and formally excavate the remaining portion of the site during the summer and fall of 1987. The project was a voluntary effort by all, accomplished on evenings and weekends. Some equipment and supplies were provided by Edge of the Cedars Museum and the White Mesa Institute of the College of Eastern Utah. Fortunately, enough of the site remained intact to enable the archaeologists to infer the basic nature and age of the site and the probable context of the cannibalism episode. The Laws site is located on the crest of a low ridge on Mustang Mesa with a panoramic view to the south and west. It lies almost precisely east of Edge ofthe Cedars Ruin, which was occupied at the same time. Both were inhabited during the last half of the 1000s A.D., a time of reliable moisture, long growing seasons and relative prosperity for the Anasazi people. Unlike Edge of the Cedars, which was one of a number of substantial . home-bas- e settle- -' ments in the area, the Laws site appears to have been a small, seasonal habitation, probably associated with an agricultural field. One room and an associated storage pit. were preserved for the archaeologists. There may have been dne or possibly two additional rooms and a dooryard activity area adjacent to the structure in the area disturbed by the loader. The surviving room contained a few implements ofAnasazi domestic life, including a cache of bone awls and a mealing bin containing a metate and mano for grinding com. A small, informal firepit was located against the west wall. A rectangular door slab found in the fill of the adjacent storage pit suggests that the surface room had a side entry through the south wall. Immediately outside and adjacent to the south side of the room was a six-fodeep, bellshaped pit. The pit was densely filled with stone building rubble, and contained no artifacts beyond scattered potsherds and flakes distributed throughout the rubble fill. Scattered fragments of rotted wooden timbers on the pit floor suggested the pit had once been roofed with a wooden platform. Access must have been through a hatch in the platform cover. No bone was found on the floor of either the room or the storage pit. A vertebra in the shallow fill above the room floor indicates the cannibalism probably occurred at the end of the rooms occupation. Although analysis of the collections is not completed, it is ritual act related to religion or sorcery. The Laws Site case seems to be an example of ritual execution and cannibalism, since the bones were carefuly buried and the house was ap- parently dismantled at the Same time. (Starving people would not be expected to waste by accusations from the other energy tearing down houses.) One documented case among the historic Hopi (descendants of the Anasazi) involved the ritual destruction of an entire village in the year 1700, and the ritual execution and cannibalism of some of its residents. That incident was stimulated villages that the residents of the village of Awatovi were behaving like witches by accepting strange, foreign and subversive ideas being introduced by Spanish Catholic priests. One of the sites where that cannibalism occured has been excavated and studied by archaeologists, and the bones were scarred and broken in a fashion very similar to those at the Laws Site. Shane Baker is currently working on the analysis of materials and the final report on the Laws Site. When the report is completed, the collections will be disposed of in accordance with the wishes of the Laws family, and a copy of the report will be available to the public at Edge of the Cedars ot top-to-botto- m possible to make some preliminary interpretations: The site was a small field house, with a living room and a large storage pit, occupied during the late 1000s A.D. Although this is known to have been a time of abundance, prosperity and nondefensive settlement behavior among the Anasazi, this house was the site of a large-scal- e episode of human cannibalism. The cannibalized remains were gathered and placed in a small pit, partially covered with a stone slab, and buried. The masonry house was apparently knocked down at the same time, and much of its building stone thrown into the storage pit. This is one of three cases of Anasazi cannibalism documented by archaeologists in the general Mesa Verde Anasazi culture area last year. Other cases were in a small dwelling in Cottonwood Wash dating to the late 800s A.D. (see Manti-LaSarticle), and a kiva associated with a family-size- d dwelling near Yellowjacket, Colorado. Approximately fifteen other cases have been al formally reported through-ou- t the Anasazi area, representing diverse time periods. Tales of other cases are told as informal lore by diggers. Studies are currently underway to try to determine whether the cannibalism was a response to conditions of starvation, or a non-archaeolog- Museum. Shane Baker will present a more detailed report on the project and the results of his research into cannibalism at an evening program at Edge of the Cedars at 7:00 on Tuesday, April 19. Skull taken from cache of bones found on Mustang Mesa shows cutting marks. ' Deseret News photo Moki (Moqui?) or Anasazi: Which is Correct? Those of us who grew up among the moki ruins, moki huts, and moki mounds of southern Utah are a bit rankled by the official use of the upstart name Anasazi by archaeologists and bureaucrats. Some of us even reveal by our hesitations and stutters a bit of confusion as to the meanings of the two terms and their relationship to one another. Here is the official Edge of the Cedars Museum explanation of the two terms. Both terms are Anglicized versions of Native American words, and are synonymously used to refer to the ancestral Pueblo farming Indians who occupied the southern half of the Colorado Plateau prior to the arrival of the Utes, Paiutes and Navajos. The term Moki is a simplified spelling of the term Moqui, which evolved from a misreading of the early Spanish name Moqui (pronounced moke-weefor the Hopi Indians. This term, ), or something like it, was adopted and adapted by various other tribes, including the Zuni (roughly amookwi), the Southern Paiiite (approximateand others. In ) ly their later writings the Spanish neglected to put the dots over the u and the spelling thus evolved from Moqui to Moqui. With this change in spelling came the inevitable change in pronunciation, from Moke-weto mokee. This spelling and moq-witz- e 2 - pronunciation Were adopted by the American people when they took political control after the Mexican War. Unfortunately, the term moqui or moki is distasteful to the Hopi, to whom it means something like dies or is dead. To the Hopi people, who consider themselves to be quite healthy both physically and culturally, the term sounds like a wishful pun by an apathetic, foreign occupying power. In the Navajo language the term moqui has something to do with human excrement, and is used as a pointedly derogatory pun on the old name for the Hopi. Out of respect for Hopi sensitivities, the official name Moqui was changed by the American government in 1923 to Hopi as a result of the efforts of anthropologist J. Walter Fewkes. This name was derived from a Hopi term for themselves and the other village dwelling Pueblos (roughly Hopitu or hohpi), meaning something like good peaceful wiseknowledgeable (in contrast to the more warlike, nomadic peoples such as Utes, Navajos and Apaches.) Meanwhile the term Moqui was adopted by the Mormon settlers of southern Utah and northern Arizona to refer not only to the Hopi, but to all the Indian ruins of the area and their ancient builders and inhabitants. In light of the Hopi association of this word with the dead, this seems an appropriate usage. . Unfortunately, .however the term Moqui did riot catch on among archaeologists. When it became necessary to adopt an official or standard term to refer to the prehistoric ancestors of the Pueblos, archaeologists turned to the traditional enemies of the Pueblos and adopted the name Anasazi from the Navajos. Although the term is commonly translated as the ancient ones (a mistake perpetuated largely by the National Park Service) Anasazi apparently derives from the Navajo Annasazi , the meaning of which is somewhat ambiguous and translates roughly as alien ancestor or ancestral enemy. It may also relate to the Navajo name Anaashashi or Naashasi, meaning something like bear enemies and referring to the people of Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico and their relatives who live with the Hopi on First Mesa. The term Anasazi and its popular mistranslation the ancient . Tewa-speakin- g ones were proposed as an official term for early Pueblo culture in 1926 by Dr. A. V. Kidder (a world renowned archaeologist who, interestingly, had been introduced to archaeological field work almost thirty years earlier on Alkali Ridge in San Juan County.) Kidder borrowed the term from Richard Wetherill, the famous cowboy archaeolo-gistcollecto- r from Mancos, Colorado. |