Gruesome Practices of Ancient Americans

Modern social science has long been in love with the idea of a virtuous past. Margret Mead's Samoan fantasy of a culture without adolescent angst or any form of sexual oppression stands out. Similarly, early studies of Chimpanzees presented us with a perfectly peaceful relative, who did nothing all day but eat and have sex. Think of it as a spa species. These scientific fantasies had their counterparts in, and frequently gave rise to, similar sexy dreams in popular culture. Herman Melville may be famous for Moby Dick, but he made his money on Typee, a semi-biographical novel that involved a couple of Americans and a lot of naked, brown women. And then there are the paintings of Gauguin.

All of this was nonsense, of course. Mead's Samoa was like everywhere else: fathers striving to protect their daughter's virginity and young men using their upper body strength to get what they wanted. Chimpanzees, meanwhile, have turned out to compare favorably only to certain dead Rap artists. Our nearest mammalian cousin is geared for war, and brutal in his politics.

Recent archeology has corrected a number of myths about the original Americans. It seems clear now that Native American civilizations were much more advanced and much more extensive than previously thought. It is also clear that they did not live in harmony with their environment, nor did their civilized life represent a model for modern civilization.

Andrew O'Hehir has a review at Salon of "Timothy Pauketat's cautious but mesmerizing new book, "Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi." Cahokia was a great city in North America that thrived a little before Thomas Aquinas discovered Aristotle.

At its peak in the 12th century, this settlement along the Mississippi River bottomland of western Illinois, a few miles east of modern-day St. Louis, was probably larger than London, and held economic, cultural and religious sway over a vast swath of the American heartland. Featuring a man-made central plaza covering 50 acres and the third-largest pyramid in the New World (the 100-foot-tall "Monks Mound"), Cahokia was home to at least 20,000 people. If that doesn't sound impressive from a 21st-century perspective, consider that the next city on United States territory to attain that size would be Philadelphia, some 600 years later.

That's fascinating. Equally interesting and appalling is this:

Simultaneous burials of as many as 53 young women (quite possibly selected for their beauty) have been uncovered beneath Cahokia's mounds, and in some cases victims were evidently clubbed to death on the edge of a burial pit, and then fell into it. A few of them weren't dead yet when they went into the pit -- skeletons have been found with their phalanges, or finger bones, digging into the layer of sand beneath them.

That is more than remarkable. Throughout human history women have been considered a vital resource, and for obvious biological reasons: a few men can have about as many children as a lot of men, but reduce the number of women and you sacrifice some of your society's reproductive potential. Fifty-three young women is a real sacrifice.

And there is this description of a mound excavated in the late sixties:

This mound contained a high-status burial of two nearly identical male bodies, one of them wrapped in a beaded cape or cloak in the shape of a thunderbird, an ancient and mystical Native American symbol. Surrounding this "beaded burial" the diggers gradually uncovered more and more accompanying corpses, an apparent mixture of honorific burials and human sacrifices evidently related to the two important men. It appeared that 53 lower-status women were sacrificed specifically to be buried with the men -- perhaps a harem or a group of slaves from a nearby subject village, Pauketat thinks -- and that a group of 39 men and women had been executed on the spot, possibly a few years later. In all, more than 250 people were interred in and around Mound 72.

Another sacrificial site contained a lot of other good stuff.

Analyzing the strata of rotting gunk found therein, Pauketat concludes that there was probably an upside to Cahokia's appalling "mortuary rituals," which he suspects were officious public ceremonies  to honor the ruling family or to install a new king. The garbage dump reveals the remains of enormous Cahokian festivals, involving as many as 3,900 slaughtered deer, 7,900 earthenware pots, and vast amounts of pumpkins, corn, porridge, nuts and berries. There was enough food to feed all of Cahokia at once, and enough potent native tobacco -- a million charred seeds at a time -- to give the whole city a near-hallucinogenic nicotine buzz.

Civilization arose independently in the new world, evidence that the trajectory of human development was firmly pointed in that direction. I wonder why mass human sacrifice was so prevalent in Native American cultures. I note that the adolescence of human civilization was marked by despotism and bloodshed everywhere and always. It took a long time for us to mature, if indeed we have or ever will.

But I also note that this gruesome confirms, in an odd way, the natural human inclination to think in terms of justice and reciprocity. What were the ancient Cahokians trying to do, by slaughtering so many men and woman, and sacrificing so much bounty? Increase the aura of their upper class, to be sure. But they were also trying to bargain with the gods. In return for all this virgin blood, you big spirits need to make the crops grow and our enemies diminish. It is terrible to say so, but only a basically moral animal could think that way.

Comments

[Rob Schmidt]

Absent for the most part from the religions of the American Indians was the near universal practice of animal and human sacrifice to placate the gods. "North America had almost no sacrifice, even of animals. Mother Earth did not demand it."

--Lewis M. Hoppe, "Religions of the World," 1976 (quote from Ruth Underhill, "Red Man's Religion," 1965)

[Rob Schmidt]

I wonder where you got the idea that "mass human sacrifice was so prevalent in Native American cultures." Can you cite a source for this claim?

Besides the Aztecs, Maya, and Cahokians, which Native cultures practiced human sacrifice? These are only three of the thousands of cultures that existed in the Americas. Unless you can list several hundred Native cultures that practiced human sacrifice, your argument fails.

[Smallbear]

Rob Schmidt is on target. The Aztecs, Maya, and Cahokians, and the group we now call Anasazi were all closely related in terms of religion and culture. They do not represent, say, the Iriquois, Lakota, Siksika, Cherokee, Shawnee, Seminoles, and others.

[FascistSocialist]

Again Ken Blanchard. You willfully ignore pertinent arguments and information and talk past the issues at hand, and it makes me sad and angry at the same time. You're an educator and it appears to me that you are failing in that role, even to yourself.

You are not an expert or even educated on the question of health care reform and the problems of the current health care CRISIS that we are in.

You can't even begin to respond to the question of why medicare is faring 100% better than private insurance while still managing to cover 100% of people over 65 because for you to even acknowledge that fact is apparently too difficult.

And when I mentioned rationing, you said the administration/Congress were not talking about or looking at solutions to that issue, you are clearly not following the debate, at all. That is one of the MAIN provisions (read Section) of ALL of the health care bills that are currently before Congress.

You say that new technologies are too expensive and people are living too long? That is the most absurd claim about the reasons behind the health care crisis I've ever, ever heard and just shows how deep your lack of knowledge about health care goes.

It makes me quite sad that anyone in a position such as yours, a blog with a regular readership and being an educator would willfully misrepresent information and facts. Simply said, you are a liar and a scoundrel. Perhaps you don't realize this, but I implore you, if you chose to continue writing about health care, take a while to read up on what the current situation actually is.

I can suggest some introductory information for you, and I really hope you take the opportunity to read it. Here is some basic, widely accepted health care information, the writing speaks for itself:

Part of the cost problem and mandatory reading for anyone talking about health care reform in this country:
Shannon Brownlee: Overtreated (Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer)
http://www.amazon.com/Overtreated-Medicine-Making-Sicker-Poorer/dp/1582345791/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249658317&sr=8-1

Articles, a quicker read... but equally important:
December 10, 2007
Atul Gawande: The Checklist
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande

June 23, 2009
Atul Gawande: The Cost Conundrum Redux
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/atul-gawande-the-cost-conundrum-redux.html

These articles are mandated reading in the White House, for all staff working on health care in any capacity. If you haven't read them... well...

[FascistSocialist]

Also, just a quick repost from another area of your blog where I responded as to why competition between health plans is a myth, and why it doesn't improve the basic problems with health care in the USA. And also addressing the claim that consumers should have some skin in the game (as if they don't already, but not the point).

A.) doctors and nurses often are unaware of what is the best treatment for a given ailment (that's why we have so much literature, studies, and specialists suggesting one way or the other), what in the world leads you to believe that a consumer of health care could know what the best course of action in a situation is? That's basically claiming that everyone who consumes health care should be able to be certified as a physician (I don't know if you've ever seen the certification tests, but what they are is a bunch of multiple choice questions with various scenarios and treatments, and you have to choose the one that's best suited)

B.) it's a bit counter-intuitive, but stimulating competition between health plans to improve the health system is something that is a myth. It hasn't happened for the last 20 years we've been trying it and it isn't going to ever work
- let's say there's a practice with 100 patients, 20 are covered by blue cross, 20 by aetna, etc.
- to get improved health care to those patients as a group the measurement data regarding them has to be analyzed and then acted on

- each health plan wants to guard its own measurement data because it sees this as an advantage for them so they can use it to provide better health care for their own members.
- the problems are: They only have access 20% of the data (so their data-set is incomplete)AND They don't want to make a recommendation to the practice because that helps all other 80% of patients and strengthens their competitors
- So, instead of providing the information on how the health system could be improved to the practice (where the information should be implemented) the insurance companies try and hire more people and set up some outside entity that does follow-up with patients only on their plan. Well, this entire system is deeply problematic because as the nature of this heavily guarded information goes, practitioners never get to see it, nor do hospitals or patients.

This is why fostering competition between health plans does not work.

In the end, rather than improving the health of patients, or improving the health system the measurement data is typically used to create tiered health plans, which helps no one receive better care and does nothing to cut costs.

So you said you didn't know what was the best way to improve the health care system, but you suggested some tactics. Well, you are right that you don't know, and your suggestions were no good. That is the crux of what I'm getting at, you don't know even the basics about health care and health care reform, yet you suggest things and write as though you know what you're talking about. You don't.

I know I'm an asshole, but hopefully you can see past that and actually absorb some basic criticisms.

[FascistSocialist]

I had linked:
June 23, 2009
Atul Gawande: The Cost Conundrum Redux
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/atul-gawande-the-cost-conundrum-redux.html

I meant to link a different article entirely! Sorry for the confusion:
June 1, 2009
Atul Gawande: The Cost Conundrum
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande

[IKG]

Before the raping and pillaging of the Americas by the most despotic races known to man, those of Europe, there were over one thousand different nations living in the Americas. Some were violent and disultory, some lived in beauty. It is funny that an American, the most violent race in the history of the planet, tries to conjecture an argument to justify the crimes of the US. Remember both Hitler and apartheid South Africa learned from the US how to lie and kill in the name of their god: money.

[Miranda]

I'm predicting Bell Curve-style backlash on this one.

I think, FS, that you have this whole thread confused with another.

[KB]

Rob Schmidt: thanks for the thought-provoking comments. Your 1976 quote proves one of my points. No one who has even the most amateur knowledge of the scholarship today could say a damn fool thing like that. I think that the "Aztecs, Maya, and Cahokians," are enough to prove my point that human sacrifice was prevalent in pre-Columbian America. They are indeed only three cultures, but they were really big deals. Evidence of cannibalism has been found along the Southern deserts of the U.S. Then there are the ice mummies of the Incas. My point stands, but this was not unusual for "bronze age cultures," so maybe it was the metal.

Smallbear: to be sure, human sacrifice was not a universal practice among Native Americans or anyone else. It seems to be a conspicuous feature of early civilizations, which is interesting. Hunter gatherer societies were remarkably egalitarian.

IKG: your comment is silly. The Inca achieved a remarkable thing: they fed all their people. But their society was perfectly totalitarian, and you can't be perfect. It was so despotic (as you put it) than when Pizarro captured Atahualpa at Cajamarca, his vast army froze in its tracks. How else could a few hundred smelly, illiterate Spaniards has annihilated it? What the Europeans did to the Americans, the later would have done to the former if the balance of knowledge and power were reversed. Welcome to Planet Earth.

[Al Carroll]

You point to a grand total of two sites. Imagine pointing to Auschwitz and Buchenwald and making the same claim, "Why was genocide so prevalent among Europeans?"

I also didn't see any sign that these sites were of sacrifices. They could've been executions of criminals or captives seized in war. (Which doesn't justify them. I'm personally opposed to the death penalty for anything other than the most heinous war crimes.)

But obviously you think in stereotypes. Indian dead = human sacrifice. Never mind that human sacrifice was common in Europe during the Spanish Inquisition. Never mind that lynching has every feature of human sacrifice except cannibalism, including the collecting of body parts for trophies.

Any good scholar would look at all possible explanations. Obviously you want a reason to imagine Indians are barbaric.

[KB]

Al: perhaps you are right. Clubbing "criminals or captives" into a pit, and burying many of them alive might be viewed as less "barbaric" than human sacrifice. Or not. But I very much doubt that women would have been among the criminals and captives so treated. Woman are assets not to be lightly wasted, unless on supposes that they can be traded for divine favor. The women at Cahokia were sacrificed. So were the Ice Mummies. So were the countless thousands whose hearts were ground into the sacrificial stones by the Aztecs.

But I point was not that Ancient American cultures were worse than European ones. Both were human cultures, and that is the point. Ancient America was no paradise. It's peoples created great civilizations independently of the rise of cities elsewhere. That is remarkable.

I just wonder whether cannibalism and human sacrifice spread from one culture to another, and so was an accidental feature of ancient American culture, or whether there was something about the ecology and geography that encouraged such things. Jerad Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, has a lot to say about the North-South axis of the Americas, and the consequences of that for the supply of large, useful animals. Might protein deficiency have explained cannibalism among the Aztecs? I don't know, but it's not a crime to ask.

Your penultimate paragraph degenerates into goofiness. The murders of the Spanish Inquisition were very bad. They were not sacrifices in any meaningful sense.

[Rob Schmidt]

The only person saying "a damn fool thing" is you in your original column, Ken.

Do you understand what "prevalent" means? If so, it isn't obvious from your posting.

To summarize, you have no evidence to back up your claim that human sacrifice was "prevalent" among the thousands of pre-Columbian Native cultures. Basically you just made up this ridiculous claim.

The Underhill quote referred to NORTH AMERICAN Indians--i.e., those north of Mexico. With your references to Central and South American Indians, you seem to have missed this point.

FYI, the Aztec empire was relatively short-lived. The Aztecs and Maya had little or nothing to do with most North and South American Indian cultures. Same with the Inca.

Archaeologists have disputed whether or not the "Anasazi" practiced cannibalism. More to the point, eating the dead isn't the same as human sacrifice. As for Cahokia, one or two examples don't prove that the Cahokians practiced human sacrifice in general. Perhaps one cruel ruler did and other rulers repudiated the practice.

It never ceases to amaze me that someone can look at a few hundred years of Aztec, Maya, and Inca history and generalize about the thousands of Native cultures across two vast continents and 10,000-plus years. "Intellectual dishonesty" is too mild a term for this practice.

P.S. If you mean your "point stands" as an example of racial prejudice against Indians, you're right. It does.

[Rob Schmidt]

Re "But [my] point was not that Ancient American cultures were worse than European ones": Yes, that is your point, Ken, since you've clearly indicted Native cultures in general without saying anything comparable about European cultures.

Re "Both were human cultures, and that is the point": That's OUR point, you mean, since we don't deny the practices of the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca. What we do deny is your made-up claim that human sacrifice was "prevalent" among the thousands of pre-Columbian Native cultures in the Americas.

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Before the raping and pillaging of the Americas by the most despotic races known to man, those of Europe, there were over one thousand different nations living in the Americas. Some were violent and disultory, some lived in beauty. It is funny that an American, the most violent race in the history of the planet, tries to conjecture an argument to justify the crimes of the US. Remember both Hitler and apartheid South Africa learned from the US how to lie and kill in the name of their god: money.

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You say that new technologies are too expensive and people are living too long? That is the most absurd claim about the reasons behind the health care crisis I've ever, ever heard and just shows how deep your lack of knowledge about health care goes.

It makes me quite sad that anyone in a position such as yours, a blog with a regular readership and being an educator would willfully misrepresent information and facts. Simply said, you are a liar and a scoundrel. Perhaps you don't realize this, but I implore you, if you chose to continue writing about health care, take a while to read up on what the current situation actually is.

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I just wonder whether cannibalism and human sacrifice spread from one culture to another, and so was an accidental feature of ancient American culture, or whether there was something about the ecology and geography that encouraged such things. Jerad Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, has a lot to say about the North-South axis of the Americas, and the consequences of that for the supply of large, useful animals. Might protein deficiency have explained cannibalism among the Aztecs? I don't know, but it's not a crime to ask.

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