Perimortem processing of human remains among the Great Basin Fremont

Abstract

The perimortem butchering of human remains has been proposed for many sites in the Anasazi Culture Area of the southwestern United States at around ad 1000. This paper presents evidence that similar practices occurred in an adjacent culture area to the north. A cluster of Fremont sites in south‐central Utah show evidence of this same processing pattern including scalping, dismemberment, cooking, and fracturing of long bones. The material from one of these Fremont sites, Backhoe Village, is presented to illustrate the similarities with butchering patterns found among the Anasazi. These parallels raise questions of contact between the two populations as well as having implications for the motives involved in these butchering practices. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

“Men, Women, and Children Starving”: Archaeology of the Donner Family Camp

“…The taphonomic principles for recognizing cannibalism in the archaeological record developed by Turner and Turner (1999), Villa (1992), and White (1992) have been applied successfully to other sites in the American Southwest (cf. Billman et al 2000;Hurlbut 2000;Lambert et al 2000), the Great Basin (Novak and Kollman 2000), the Arctic (Melbye and Fairgrieve 1994), the Pacific (Degusta 2000), and Europe (Caceres et al 2007), albeit with some detractors (Bullock 1991; Darling 1999;Dongoske et al 2000;Ogilvie and Hilton 2000). Moreover, such principles have been applied to extremely old hominine remains from Spain and France (Defleur et al 1999;Diez et al 1999;Fernandez-Jalvo et al 1999).…”

Deposition of modified human remains as evidence for complex mortuary treatment in East Africa during the first millenniumAD

“…In these cases, special measures may be required to keep these individuals from returning to cause harm to the living (Lee & Vaughan, 2008). In North America ( ad 700–1300), it has been suggested that assemblages containing partial, dismembered remains with evidence of cut marks and heat damage may be the result of witch killings (Hurlbut, 2000; Martin, 2016; Novak & Kollman, 2000). In the United Kingdom ( ad 1200–1400), similar modifications have been interpreted as efforts to prevent the rise of revenant corpses (Mays et al, 2017).…”

“…To support arguments for cannibalism, human remains should also display modifications which are virtually identical to those found in animal bone assemblages (Morales-Pérez et al, 2017;Villa, Courtin, & Helmer, 1988;White, 1992). Although the remains from Kabusanza display tool marks consistent with butchery and fragmentation, these do not appear with the same frequency (11.9%) or degree of fragmentation that has been observed in 'cannibalized' assemblages, where in excess of 40% of fragments show some form of modification (Bello et al, 2016;Novak & Kollman, 2000;Turner & Turner, 1999). They also differ from modifications identified in animal bone assemblages from eastern Africa.…”

Archaeological Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation

“…One way archaeologists identify anthropophagy is by studying the processing and cooking of human osteological remains. Novak and Kollmann (2000) analyzed human remains from the Fremont culture area in south-central Utah, dating to around AD 1000, and found that human bones were processed and cooked just like animal meat for consumption. Evidence for capturing, killing, and processing human bodies at the Sacred Ridge settlement in the early AD 800s comes from a combined analysis of the butchering patterns on the bones, human remains on a metate, and a cooking jar that contained human myoglobin (Kuckelman 2016).…”