Interpreting Burned Commingled Ancestral Remains in the American Southwest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Highly fragmented ancestral remains are found throughout the Ancestral Puebloan region of the American Southwest (AD 800–1700). These human remains are often cut, burned, broken, disarticulated, and commingled. For the last 20 years, the narrative has been that these collections were burned to be eaten (anthropophagy/cannibalism). This narrative fails to include Puebloan ethnography, which discusses fire as a tool of transformation and purification. Burning and ashes serve a critical role in many Pueblo ceremonies and curing rites. There are accounts of fire being used as a purifying act to ritualistically destroy villages and to annihilate the bodies of those accused of witchcraft. This research project embraces the complicated relationship between the victims and those individuals who handled their bodies after death. Violence is never an isolated or meaningless act but intentional, communicative, and culturally meaningful. The act of burning these bodies held a greater cultural meaning than simply burning for consumption. This project brings together bioarcheological data, ethnographic, and archival resources to reconstruct and contextualize these ancestral remains. Using social theory about body transformation and body agency, a reinterpretation is offered about the nuance of how these commingled bodies were handled.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38381.0