The Bioarchaeology of Violence

5. Community Violence and Everyday Life: Death at Arroyo Hondo

5 Community Violence and Everyday Life Death at Arroyo Hondo Ann M. Palkovich Introduction Three young children—ages 3, 4, and 4 1/2—were interred together in the trash fill of a room at the fourteenth-century ancestral pueblo of Arroyo Hondo in the Northern Rio Grande. Their shared burial, their body positions (two were partly flexed but one individual was partly laid on top of the other two with the left arm extended above the head), and the fact that two large mano fragments are laid directly on the bodies are all unusual interment characteristics. Beyond a common grave, these children share a pattern of skeletal injuries . Each died as a result of a forceful fatal blow to the crown of the head. In each case, these fractures centered on the sagittal suture and radiated downward, fracturing parietals and temporals; separating coronal, sagittal, occipital, and temporal sutures; and fracturing and separating the basicranium. Only one child, the four-year-old, showed evidence of facial trauma; three upper and two lower incisors were snapped off at the alveolus. All three children exhibited greenstick fractures of the ribs on both sides of their torsos, indicating that their bodies were also beaten or clubbed. Such disquieting forensic data suggest that these three children may have been killed in a single violent act and that their bodies were then disposed of in a common grave without ceremony. The mano fragments that were recovered above their bodies may have served as the instrument of their deaths. 112 · Ann M. Palkovich The well-preserved partial remains of a 13-year-old adolescent—an articulated right leg, an articulated left arm, and bits of the right forearm— were also recovered with these children. It is difficult to fully account for this partial skeleton. No additional bone fragments or evidence of weathering were noted for this adolescent’s skeleton, nor was there any cutting, marring, or other manipulation of these remains. There is no skeletal evidence of physical violence directed at this individual. Though this adolescent —either as a whole body or as partial articulated remains—appears to have been interred at the same time with the three children, what he or she represents in this multiple interment is uncertain. The deaths of the three young children are further contextualized by number of other informal interments noted at Arroyo Hondo. The remains of six adults, five on or near the floor and one in the trash fill, were recovered from Kiva G-5. Four adults were recovered from the floors of two rooms in Roomblock 16. In addition, skull fragments exhibiting drybone fracturing and kerf marks on a radius and ulna found scattered on the floor in Roomblock 18 represent at least two adults whose remains were manipulated postmortem. Together, these three children, one adolescent , and 12 adults were subject to acts of violence or postmortem manipulation during the 20 years this area of Arroyo Hondo was inhabited. Aggression and violence experienced within ancestral Puebloan communities (see chapters 1 and 6 this volume), including Arroyo Hondo, have been variously interpreted as an expression of broad-scale power relations. Such violence may include acts of social dominance or intimidation such as nonlethal abuse (Kantner 1997, 1999; Kuckelman et al. 2000; Martin 1997), cannibalism (e.g., Turner and Turner 1999; White 1992; see also Walker 2008), or systematic genocide (Komar 2008; Potter and Chuipka 2010). Yet community violence can also represent culturally embedded acts in which aggression in response to calamitous everyday events are framed by the group’s world view, beliefs, and practices. Within the limits of our ability to reconstruct past behavior, the context and patterns of violence can provide us with insights into what the deaths of these children could have represented to those who resided at Arroyo Hondo. Witchcraft currently is one of the most persuasive interpretations for some acts of violence noted in ancestral Pueblo villages. Discussions of witchcraft are found throughout the published literature and in ethnographies of various Puebloan groups (e.g., Anderson et al. 1989; Cushing 1967 [1882–1883]; Hawley 1950; Hill and Lange 1982; Hoebel 1952; Lummis 1894; Community Violence and Everyday Life: Death at Arroyo Hondo · 113 Ortiz 1969; Parsons 1927a, 1927b, 1939; Simmons 1974; Smith and Roberts 1954; Stevenson 1904; Titiev 1972; White 1935, 1942, 1962). Witches were personifications of evil in Puebloan society and were held responsible for drought, illness, and other misfortunes, from...