PAST CRIMESDuring the Mesolithic (beginning around 11500BC) and the following
Neolithic period from around 6500BC, there were massacres of large numbers
of people at several sites, frequently with more females and children
represented among the dead than males. In these cases, we may have to
designate these killings as‘war crimes’rather than murder.
In Britain, a large number of bodies from the Neolithic have been found
with arrowheads in the grave, as well as skull fractures and other skeletal
damage. It is often hard to know whether arrowheads in a grave were placed
there as part of the deceased’s equipment for the afterlife, or whether they had
actually been shot into the body when the person was alive, and have fallen to
the bottom of the grave when the body decomposed. There are a number of
possibilities that could explain these finds – warfare between rival
communities and hunting accidents could have resulted in deaths from arrows
and spears. Murder is much more difficult to ascertain.
Ancient cannibals and sacrificial victims
Cannibalism may also be indicated in North America, in the case of the
Anasazi people who lived in what is known as the Four Corners region (where
Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado meet) between the first and twelfth
centuriesAD. These prehistoric people built a number of large settlements,
often consisting of contiguous housing complexes on several levels, as well as
‘cliff castles’ –defensive communities placed on ledges high up in canyon
walls. One of the most famous of these sites is Pueblo Bonito, with some 800
rooms or dwelling units, in Chaco Canyon. Here, and in some 40 sites across
the area, nearly 300 possible victims of cannibalism have been found.
Evidence for cannibalism relies on several types of material: bones that
have been broken open to extract the marrow, socalled‘anvil’abrasions on
bones that indicate that a hammer stone has been used on them, signs of
burning especially on the back of the skull which would occur if someone
wished to extract the brain, an absence of spongy bone elements which would
have completely disappeared had they been cooked and digested, and a shiny
marking called‘pot polish’which appears on bones that have been cooked in
ceramic pots. However, none of these clues alone prove that people ate other
human beings.
Then in 1997, in a canyon called Cowboy Wash, the remains of 24 people
were found, which represented about a third of the whole population of that
area. The signs suggested that their bodies had been chopped and cooked. One
other clue, however, was found at Cowboy Wash–a coprolite. A coprolite is a
semifossilised piece of human excrement. When analysed, this coprolite was