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Hi Workjay,

Are you familiar with this theory??? Has some facts behind it...

Chaco wasn't just abandoned,,,it was sealed up,,,some saying it

took as much effort to seal it as to build it...from PBS...

All Anasazi roads led to Chaco Canyon, an irregular gash cut deep into the surrounding desert plateau. Down the center of the canyon runs an arroyo, athin stream of water, which made life possible for the settlers of this dry land. The Anasazi built huge, inaccessible stone apartment houses high against the walls of the canyon. They survived the arid land by digging canals and irrigating small desert farms, where they raised corn, squash, beans, and cotton.

Chaco canyon, despite its great power and beauty, was a place of hideous evil, according to Navajo legends. It is said that the Chaco people abused sacred ceremonies, practiced witchcraft and cannibalism, and made a dreadedsubstance called corpse powder by cooking and grinding up the flesh andbones of the dead. Their evil threw the world out of balance, and they weredestroyed in a great earthquake and fire.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/html/e4-explore2.html

More than a century ago, American travellers in the Southwest were astounded to find ruined cities and vast cliff dwellings dotting the desert landscape. Surely, they thought, a great civilization had once flourished here. It looked to them as if the people who created it had simply walked away and vanished: the ruins were often littered with gorgeous painted pottery and also contained grinding stones, baskets, sandals hanging on pegs, and granaries full of corn. The Navajo Indians, who were occupying much of the territory where this lost civilization once existed, called them the Anasazi--a word meaning "Ancient Enemy"--and they avoided the ruins, believing they were inhabited by chindi, or ghosts.

As a result, the Anasazi captured the fancy of people outside the archeological profession, and particularly those in the New Age movement, many of whom see themselves as the Anasazi's spiritual descendants. The ruins of Chaco Canyon have long been a New Age mecca, to the point where one of the sites had to be closed, because New Agers were burying crystals and illegally arranging to have their ashes scattered there. During Harmonic Convergence, in 1987, thousands gathered in Chaco Canyon and joined hands, chanting and praying. People have also flocked to the villages of the present-day Pueblo Indians--the Hopi in particular--seeking a spirituality outside Western civilization. The Hopi Themselves, along with other Pueblo Indian descendants of the Anasazi, feel a deep reverence for their prehistoric ancestors.

Turner has identified many Anasazi sites that he believes represent "charnel deposits"--heaps of cannibalized remains. Next month, the University of Utah Press will publish the results of his work, under the title "Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest." The term "man corn" is the literal translation of the Nahuatl (Aztec) word tlacatlaolli, which refers to a "sacred meal of sacrificed human meat, cooked with corn." (The book had a co-author, in Turner's wife, Jacqueline--also an anthropologist--who died in 1996.)

Turner's book does more than attack the traditional views of the Anasazi. It also addresses one of the great unsolved problems of American archeology: What caused the collapse of the Chaco culture around 1150? There was a severe drought at the time, but most researchers don't believe that it alone could have brought about such a cultural implosion. Other, unknown factors must have played a role.

After the Chaco collapse and abandonment, many Anasazi moved into deep, remote canyons, building their dwellings in cliffs or on high, often fortified, mesas. A century later, they abandoned even these defensive positions, leaving almost the entire Four Comers region uninhabited. To some archeologists, it seemed as if the Anasazi had been seized with paranoia--that they were protecting themselves from some terrible enemy. But, no matter how hard archeologists looked, they could find no such enemy.

Turner theorized that cannibalism might have been used by a powerful elite at Chaco Canyon as a form of social control. "It was order by terrorism," he said to me. "Big-stick order." In "Man Corn" he writes:

Terrorizing, mutilating, and murdering might be evolutionarily useful behaviors when directed against unrelated competitors. And what better way to amplify opponents' fear than to reduce victims to the subhuman level of cooked meat, especially when they include infants and children from whom no power or prestige could be derived but whose consumption would surely further terrorize, demean, and insult their helpless parents or community? ... The benefits would be threefold: community control, control of reproductive behavior (that is, dominating access to women), and food. From the standpoint of sociobiology, then, cannibalism could well represent useful behavior done by well-adjusted, normal adults acting out their ultimate, evolutionarily channelled behavior. On the other hand, one can easily look upon violence and cannibalism as socially pathological.

The second question Turner asked was "Who were these cannibals and where did they come from?" He looked around for a source. The Anasazi's immediate neighbors showed no evidence of being cannibalistic. "I couldn't find cannibalism in California or on the Great Plains, either," Turner said. "Where is it? In Mexico."

Turner directed his attention to central Mexico, to the empire of the Toltecs--the precursors of the Aztecs--which lasted from about 800 to 1100 A.D. Central Mexico, he writes, developed a "very powerful, dehumanizing sociopolitical and ideological complex," centered on human sacrifice and cannibalism used as a form of social control. Furthermore, cannibalism spread from central Mexico "into the jungle world of the Mayas and the desert world of Chichimeca" in northern Mexico. Turner concludes, "It takes nearly blind faith in the effectiveness of geographical distance ... to believe that this complex and its adherents failed to reach the American Southwest."

During the Toltec period, Turner hypothesizes, a heavily armed group of "thugs," "tinkers," or perhaps even "Manson party types" (as he put it to me in various conversations) headed north, to the region we refer to as the American Southwest. "They entered the San Juan Basin around A.D. 900," he surmises in "Man Corn," and "found a suspicious but pliant population whom they terrorized into reproducing the theocratic lifestyle they had previously known in Mesoamerica."

In other words, the flowering of Chaco society that we have so long admired--in engineering, astronomy, architecture, art, and culture--was the product of a small, heavily armed gang from Mexico, who marched into the Southwest to conquer and brutalize.

Archeologists have long known that there was a strong Mesoamerican influence on the Anasazi. There was extensive prehistoric trade between Mexico and the Southwest. Turquoise from Santa Fe has been found throughout Mesoamerica, and tropical parrots and macaws brought up live from Mexico have been found in Chaco graves. Indeed, corn, pottery, and cotton originally came into the Southwest from Mexico. There is good evidence, Turner writes in Man Corn, that Mexicans did in fact make the journey northward. He notes that a skull found in Chaco Canyon had intentionally chipped teeth--a decorative trait thought to be restricted almost entirely to central Mexico. He also details many parallels between Hopi and Toltec mythology.

A number of Pueblo Indian myths seem to support Turner's cannibalism theories. For example, a Pueblo legend collected by the anthropologist John Gunn and published in 1916 describes a drought and famine in the past which reduced the people "to such an extremity that they killed and ate their children or weaker members of the tribe."

The Navajo tell many stories about Chaco Canyon that paint a very different picture from the popular Anglo view--stories that may also have been taken from the Pueblo Indians. While doing research for a book on the Navajo creation story, I was told a number of these stories. Chaco, some older Navajo say, was a place of hideous evil. The Chaco people abused sacred ceremonies, practiced witchcraft and cannibalism, and made a dreaded substance called corpse powder by cooking and grinding up the flesh and bones of the dead. Their evil threw the world out of balance, and they were destroyed in a great earthquake and fire.

http://www.prestonchild.com/books/thunderhead/art36,132

Sacrifices were taken to the tops of the Aztec pyramids and laid upon a flat stone. There, their chests were cut open and their hearts were ripped out. The bodies were then thrown down the steps of the pyramid. The Spaniards who witnessed this violence were horrified.

Also, the Aztecs did not have livestock. They practiced cannibalism on their captives. After the sacrifices tumbled down the stairs, the Aztec priests removed the limbs and cooked them. The hands and thighs were delicacies.

Estimates suggest 20,000 people a year were sacrificed by the Aztec royalty. This royalty was made up of a priest class. The priests directly served the Chosen Speaker. In Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital city (with between 150,000 and 300,00 inhabitants it was one of the biggest metropolises in the world at the time) there were five thousand priests.

The priests painted their bodies black in order to symbolize religion and war. Their hair was matted with blood from human sacrifices. They filed their teeth to sharp points.

http://home.comcast.net/~burokerl/aztecs_human_sacrifices.htm

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Hi ptcarroll,

Hmmm....I don't know...here's some info...

Many archaeologists believe that warfare was the most reasonable theory for abandonment. This warfare is thought to be with either invading enemy tribes, or other Anasazi (Cordell, 1994). The Ute and Navajo Indians, who were thought to be the enemy tribes, were not in the Southwest region during the time period of the abandonment. Many suggest that Numic-speaking Indians were to blame for the warfare (Torres, 2003).

http://www.hotchkiss.k12.co.us/hhs/english/webfolios/2003/mhoman/research.htm

This is interesting...

http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1382&context=ucmercedlibrary/jcgba

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