Date of Award

1-1-2016

Language

English

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School/Department

Department of Anthropology

Content Description

1 online resource (vii, 70 pages) : color maps.

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Sean M Rafferty

Keywords

Ancestral Puebloan, prehistoric Southwest, violence, warfare, Warfare, Prehistoric, Violence, Ancestral Pueblo culture, Pueblo Indians, Cannibalism, Human remains (Archaeology), Environmental degradation

Subject Categories

History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology

Abstract

The last four decades of research regarding the late prehistoric American Southwest has produced abundant evidence for violence, warfare and cannibalism among the Ancestral Puebloan peoples. Most archaeologists attribute this rise in violence and subsequent abandonment of the Four Corners region to degrading environmental conditions. While ecological factors surely contributed, it is hard to accept that this alone led to the extreme mutilation of hundreds of human remains found throughout the Pueblo territory. It is proposed that increasing social complexity along with new ritual practices resulted in intense and violent attacks throughout the Pueblo expanse.

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