Were the Anasazi Cannibals?

What a question to even ask, right? We don’t go around asking if Napoleon and his army were cannibals. We don’t question if the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., were cannibals. We don’t even accuse the Nazis of being cannibals. They weren’t.

But the Anasazi, it seems, were. Or at least there is strong evidence that they, at times, practiced cannibalism.

In the annals of human history, the accusation of cannibalism is one of the most demeaning. Any group or culture or society that practices cannibalism is universally considered so evil and immoral as to be beyond hope, without redeeming qualities, so evil as to be as bad or worse than the Nazis of World War II (see Were the Anasazi Nazis?).

In nearly every substantial book I’ve read on the Anasazi, their possible practice of cannibalism has been addressed. The modern descendants of the Anasazi, the Puebloans in particular, take great offense at suggestions that their ancestors engaged in such dark practices.

And yet, the evidence is compelling, even into modern historical times, meaning after the arrival of Coronado’s Spanish expedition in the American Southwest in 1540.

How much evidence is there for Anasazi cannibalism?

In twenty-five years of work, [physical anthropologist Christy G.] Turner has amassed some three dozen separate instances of Anasazi cannibalism, comprising more than three hundred victims. —Roberts/Old Ones, p. 159

Three hundred known victims of Anasazi cannibalism in a larger population that must have been in the tens of thousands is not a large number.

But in modern American, with a current population of about 320 million, we do not have three hundred known victims of cannibalism. In that context, this is an alarming number.

If there were instances of cannibalism in the same ratio (300 per, say, 50,000 Anasazi—and yes, I’m guessing because I can find no definitive scientific estimate of peak Anasazi population), there would be nearly two million instances of cannibalism in the United States.

Like I said. There were an alarming number (and percentage) of instances of Anasazi cannibalism.

Is the evidence of prehistoric cannibalism in the American Southwest directly related to the Anasazi?

One day in 1993, [physical anthropologist Christy G.] Turner and David Wilcox plotted the three dozen cannibalism sites on a large map. “Suddenly,” Turner recalled, “we had a kind of ‘Eureka!’ Nearly every site lay close to a Chaco outlier. And the dates were right—between 900 and 1200. —Roberts/Old Ones, pp. 159-160

This is pretty compelling. The surrounding cultures—both temporally and geographically—did not leave evidence of cannibalism.

But the Anasazi left plenty of evidence in close proximity to their most “sacred” sites. (I use quotation marks for “sacred” not to belittle the notion of sacredness, but to emphasize that what the Anasazi may have considered “sacred,” we may consider “repugnant” and “morally unacceptable.”)

More than half of Anasazi archaeological sites have evidence of cannibalism

[Physical anthropologist Christy G. Turner II of Arizona State University]…contends that the Anasazi and other Southwest Indians, far from being peaceful farmers and builders, engaged in warfare, violence, and the concomitant horror of cannibalism. His argument is based on an assessment of human bone assemblages recovered from scattered floor deposits or charnel pits throughout the region…. They examined more than seventy-five archaeological sites containing several hundred individuals and contend that cannibalism probably took place at thirty-eight of them [51 percent]. —Frazier/Chaco, pp. 237-238

If more than half of modern graveyards in the U.S. showed evidence of cannibalism, then Americans would be known (and reviled) as a nation of cannibals.

The Anasazi nation, at least for a period of time, was such a nation.

But why? If it wasn’t hunger—and the Anasazi were hugely successful farmers under the harsh conditions of the American Southwest—then why in the world would they practice cannibalism?

Religion? That’s the go-to answer for almost anything archaeologists don’t readily understand.

Or was it something else?

Anasazi cannibalism was a purposeful policy of social control

[Physical anthropologist Christy G.] Turner [further] contends that the charnel deposits were often associated, both in time and place, with Chacoan great houses throughout the region. He further suggests that Chaco Canyon was the center of Anasazi cannibalism and that it was not an isolated practice but a purposeful policy to exert and reinforce social control. —Frazier/Chaco, p. 238

That last phrase is haunting: Anasazi cannibalism was a purposeful policy to exert and reinforce social control.

What kind of people, what kind of leaders, use cannibalism as a tool of social control? Even Hitler didn’t do that. Or Genghis Khan. Or Stalin.

And further, what kind of people put up with it? Why didn’t the Anasazi commoners rebel?

Perhaps because cannibalism, as a social-control tool, works too well—they must have been frightened nearly to death.

Invaders from Mexico (splinter groups from the ultraviolent Toltecs) terrorized the Anasazi

[W]e propose that the majority of Chaco Anasazi cannibal episodes resulted from acts of violent terrorism, possibly combined with ritual, incited by a few zealous cultists from Mexico. —Turner/Man Corn p. 484

Zealous cultists who feel justified in practicing terrorism are a problem for every age, not just our own.

The Anasazi commoners tolerated it as long as they could, and then they voted with their feet by leaving.

Zealous cultists without victims die out pretty quick.

Anasazi commoners were essentially enslaved by the threat of cannibalism

We propose that these southerners [from Mexico, mainly offshoots of the collapsing Toltecs]…entered the San Juan basin around A.D. 900 and found a suspicious but pliant population whom they terrorized into reproducing the theocratic lifestyle they had previously known in Mesoamerica. This involved heavy payments of tribute, constructing the Chaco system of great houses and roads, and providing victims for ceremonial sacrifice. The Mexicans achieved their objectives through the use of warfare, violent example, and terrifying cult ceremonies that included human sacrifice and cannibalism. —Turner/Man Corn pp. 482-483

Imagine if ultra-extremists escaped the final days of the Nazi Third Reich and, say, entered Southeast Asia where they tried to set up a new and improved Fourth Reich.

The modern world would not have tolerated that, of course. But in the ancient world, without global communications and military force, there would have been little stopping them.

I imagine a figure like Hitler, a charismatic person who, rather that succumb to the fall of their Toltec culture, escapes north, looking for a new land to rebuild the glories of the past.

There may have been waves of such cultists, who not only believed they had the right to cannibalize the local inhabitants (just as the Nazis believed they had the right to rid the world of Jews and Christians and other religious and ethnic groups they thought inferior), but who also realized they could gain tremendous elitist power by the ritual show of killing, cooking, and eating any clan or village that did not pay adequate tribute to the new kings in town.

Cannibalism at the Pretty Village—Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon

To date there are ten known sites in Chaco Canyon with taphonomic evidence of probable cannibalism and violence. For cannibalism, there are Peñasco Blanco (eight individuals), Pueblo Bonito (two), Small House (eight), and Bc59 (one). —Turner/Man Corn p. 461

Have you been to Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico?

It’s full of mystery: the enormity of the structure, the odd architecture (by our modern standards), the setting in an inhospitable desert-like canyon.

But to imagine cannibalism there, the kind of ritual killing and cooking and eating that we associate with the Maya and Toltecs of Mexico, hurts our brains. Mine, anyway.

Rather than a pretty village, it becomes a house of horrors.

Perhaps we should change the name to Casa de los Horrores.

Anasazi cannibalism: social control, ritual human sacrifice, and social pathology

Our proposed explanation for Anasazi cannibalism combines…social control, ritual human sacrifice, and social pathology. —Turner/Man Corn p. 462

Let’s look at each of those a moment.

1. Social pathology

I like to go into root words, etymology, to gain deeper understandings of what words mean.

pathology (n.) “science of diseases,” 1610s, from French pathologie (16c.), from medical Latin pathologia “study of disease,” from Greek pathos “suffering” (see pathos) + –logia “study” (see –logy). In reference to the study of abnormal mental conditions from 1842. Ancient Greek pathologia was “study of the passions;” the Greek word for “science of diseases” was pathologike (“pathologics”) —Online Etymology Dictionary/Pathology

“The study of abnormal mental conditions.” The practice of cannibalism would certainly be an abnormal mental conditions.

On the scale practiced by the Anasazi, that implies their whole culture—the culture of the leaders and elite, anyway—suffered from mental illness.

Did Hitler and his top entourage suffer from mental illness? From social pathology?

There is little doubt in my mind (but perhaps I suffer from personal mental pathology—there is little doubt in my mind, though I am not and have never been a cannibal).

2. Ritual human sacrifice

Ritual is derived from a religious rite, from Latin ritus “religious observance or ceremony, custom, usage.”

This harkens to the standard mental images we have of Mayan and Aztec priests cutting out the heart of a sacrificial victim and holding it up for the Sun God to approve.

A priest elite backed by a palace guard of warriors could (and did) both terrorize and enthrall an entire culture that lasted for generations.

The ancient ritual continues to this day in the Christian practice of Holy Communion, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper—eating the symbolic body of Christ and drinking His symbolic blood.

The echoes of religious cannibalism are still with us.

3. Social control

This is, to me, the most interesting of Turner’s three explanations for Anasazi cannibalism.

The Nazis killed millions not for social control, but to purify their Aryan race, for the purposes of ethnic cleansing.

The religious rituals of cannibalism are to appease the gods or to be one with the martyr, to remind ourselves of the sacrifice of the one who died for our sins.

But “social control”? That’s a different thing altogether.

In nations and cultures that practice the death penalty for heinous crimes, the primary argument is to discourage others from behaving in such a manner—that’s the essence of social control. Setting an example that persuades others to act in certain ways.

In that sense, the ritual of Holy Communion is similar. Through the ritual, we are reminded what to think, to believe, and how to act.

But in the Anasazi world, it was probably more like a punishment for failing to pay tribute or taxes to the governing elite.

How much corn did you put by this year? Pay it up, or we’ll kill, cook, and eat you.

What community of dispersed farmers can resist that?

(I imagine the hatred those farmers would have for the governing elite—how they must have plotted against their masters, how they must have tried such things as poisoning the dried corn they delivered, how they must have prayed to their various gods to deliver them from the evil of the priests in the big houses of Chaco Canyon.)

Invaders from the south may have worshipped the gods of the underworld, of death and dying

Specifically, we think some of these [Toltec] immigrants might have been warrior-cultists dedicated to gods of the Tezcatlipoca-Xipe Totec complex, with its human sacrifice and cannibalism. —Turner/Man Corn p. 463

If your god or God demands that you kill, cook, and eat people, then it’s blasphemy to do otherwise.

Imagine living in a culture that sends you straight to hell (or the equivalent) for failing to take part in eating the clan next door.

That’s a religion-induced social pathology.

There are no recognizable images of Tzcatlipoca in prehistoric Southwestern art, but Quetzalcoatl is represented as the horned or Plumed Serpent, and Xipe Totec may have been represented as Maasaw. —Turner/Man Corn p. 466

Másaw is a Hopi god or spirit that, like a fallen angel, was condemned by the Creator for being too self-centered and relegated to guardian of the underworld or Hades or Hell.

Másaw is Lucifer, the Devil, the Antichrist.

Real social control: Reducing enemies of the state to the subhuman level of cooked meat

The use of cannibalism as a short-term mechanism for social control fits the sociobiological paradigm [of the Anasazi] well. What better way to amplify opponents’ fear than to reduce victims to the subhuman level of cooked meat, especially when they include infants and children from whom no power or prestige could be derived but whose consumption would surely further terrorize, demean, and insult their helpless parents or community. —Turner/Man Corn p. 477

Social-control cannibalism is effective precisely because it is so horrible.

Serial killers are nothing compared to state-sponsored terrorism who don’t just kill people, but cook and eat them.

Can you imagine a radical group infiltrating the United States and staging a coup in Washington, D.C., and capping it off by killing, cooking, and eating Congress (both parties) and the Supreme Court on TV? Now imagine guns didn’t exist, and all we had to fight back with were sticks and stones.

Citizens of the Anasazi nation lived under that kind of regime.

Cannibalism as a tool of social control is exceptionally low-tech and can be effectively carried out by a small minority

Logically, cannibalism could have adaptive potential that in Anasazi times required no new technology, no increase in the number of warriors or assailants, and no new skills. —Turner/Man Corn p. 477

The modern equivalent of high-lever tools involve lots of technology—such as drones piloted from half a world away that can target and kill individuals with less “collateral” damage than ever before.

If, let’s say, Oklahoma decided to secede from the Union (would the remaining United States build a wall to keep out Okies?), you know they would back down really fast if even just a few missile-packing drones sent by Washington swarmed over the capitol.

Just like the citizens of the Anasazi nation backed down from rebellion when squads of cannibals arrived from Chaco Canyon.

It takes months if not years of training to expertly guide military drones.

It might take a few seconds of training to whet the appetite of a cannibal (especially the already-hyperviolent fanatics flowing in from the collapsing Toltec nation to the south).

The Chaco phenomenon involved “intrusive terrorism” that included cannibalism

Integrating cannibalism into an alternative model for the Chaco phenomenon suggests something that might be called “intrusive terrorism”: enter a place uninvited, often by force, and coerce by use of systematic violence and intimidation. —Turner/Man Corn p. 482

How can terrorism not be “intrusive”? By its nature, terrorism intrudes unwanted into the lives of those it snuffs or wounds.

We don’t say the Nazi occupation of France was by “intrusive terrorism,” though it was certainly that.

So this strikes me as a strange and unnecessary term.

If the Anasazi populace was terrorized from squads of cannibals directed by high-ranking officials from Chaco Canyon, then, essentially, they suffered from “domestic terrorism.”

After a generation or two passed from when the invaders arrived, then it’s no longer “intrusive,” but, rather, “home-grown” terrorism.

Southerners from Mesoamerica subdued the Anasazi populace

“We propose that these southerners [from Mexico, mainly the Toltecs]…entered the San Juan basin around A.D. 900 and found a suspicious but pliant population whom they terrorized into reproducing the theocratic lifestyle they had previously known in Mesoamerica.” This involved heavy payments of tribute, constructing the Chaco system of great houses and roads, and providing victims for ceremonial sacrifice. The Mexicans achieved their objectives through the use of warfare, violent example, and terrifying cult ceremonies that included human sacrifice and cannibalism. —Turner/Man Corn pp. 482-483

It’s difficult not to be reminded of the European conquest of Native Americans. The Spanish achieved their objectives through the use of warfare, violent example, and terrifying Catholic ceremonies that included symbolic cannibalism (Holy Communion).

But at least the Spanish were civilized enough not to barbecue the natives and serve them for post-Communion lunch.

Anasazi cannibal poop with human tissue in it

In one instance, ancient human feces even seem to contain traces of digested human tissue. —Witze/Researchers Divided

This is the final proof: Only a confirmed cannibal would poop out traces of digested human tissue.

Are there other explanations for what appears to be social-control Anasazi cannibalism?

Several [critics of Anasazi cannibalism] concede the grisly violence but suggest the destruction of the bones followed execution of people thought in Anasazi culture to be witches. The breaking up and crushing of their bones may have been a way of banishing the evil powers and proclaiming utter superiority. —Frazier/Chaco, pp. 238-239

Yeah, blame witches.

But even the Salem witch trials didn’t end in cannibalism.

And yet, there may be some validity to this. In modern times, we don’t give much credence to witches. We don’t fear them like the people of Salem, Massachusetts, did. Before the advent science and formalized rational, logical thinking, witchcraft would have been something frightening.

What’s a possible modern equivalent? Terrorism, perhaps, in a way. We moderns are unreasonably afraid of terrorism, just as the ancients may have been unreasonably afraid of witches.

The Anasazi disposed of witches by eating them like wild game. We moderns dispose of terrorists by incarcerating them in Guantanamo prison camps or disintegrating them with missiles from drone aircraft.

It’s not Anasazi cannibals—it’s Anasazi witches!

Andrew Darling, an archaeologist with the Gila River Indian Community in southern Arizona, thinks the entire picture paints a story of witch execution rather than cannibalism. For witches to lose their power, he said, others would have had to cut up the body until they found the location of the witch’s “evil heart,” which could be anywhere from the head to the big toe. Dismembering a witch would have been the only way to prevent the witch from wreaking revenge after death, Darling says. Witches, in fact, were the only Anasazi people who would have practiced cannibalism; eating human flesh would have been considered an initiation into witchhood, Darling says. In this context, cannibalism would have been just as reviled among the Anasazi as it is today. —Witze/Researchers Divided

I don’t deny that fear of witches and witchcraft may have—probably did, in fact—motivate the Anasazi (and most other prehistoric Native Americans) to do some ghastly things, but on the scale we’ve seen from the archaeological/anthropological evidence?

Could fear of witches have driven the Anasazi to the brink of collapse—and then caused the centralized structure to finally fall, leading to mass migrations and depopulation of the entire Four Corners region?

I suppose it’s possible.

So, in place of Christy G. Turner’s hypothesis of outside radicals eating their way to dominance, Anasazi citizens ate their way through a burgeoning witch population, only to get sick to their stomachs, which made them run away (from Chaco Canyon and other Anasazi cities) forever.

I think Turner’s hypothesis sounds more plausible. But a resurrected Anasazi could convince me otherwise.

No, it’s not cannibalism or witchcraft—it’s ethnic cleansing!

A 1997 excavation at Cowboy Wash near Dolores, Colorado, found remains of at least twenty-four human skeletons that showed evidence of violence and dismemberment, with strong indications of cannibalism. This modest community appears to have been abandoned during the same time period. Other excavations within the Ancestral Puebloan cultural area produce varying numbers of unburied, and in some cases dismembered, bodies. In a 2010 paper, Potter and Chuipka argued that evidence at Sacred Ridge Site, near Durango, Colorado, is best interpreted as ethnic cleansing. —Wikipedia/Anasazi Warfare

Yeah, maybe.

But ethnic cleansing doesn’t motivate a population of dispersed farmers to start carrying logs from sixty miles away to use as frames for enormous stone structures in a canyon in the middle of nowhere.

Did “cleansing” themselves of Jews make the Nazis work harder? Well, yeah, I guess it did in a way. But it also cost them an enormously productive workforce.

And which ethnicity did the Anasazi cleanse? Modern descendants of the Anasazi speak a plethora of languages (a mystery in itself), so they must have been made up of many ethnic groups. Did they eat one group, but leave the others alone?

I’m skeptical. Turner’s hypothesis still makes the most sense to me. It better aligns with what history reveals as basic human nature—mindless zealots ruining civilization for everyone.

Is there oral history evidence of recent cannibalism by the descendants of the Ansazi?

In the year 1700 [the Hopi village of] Awatovi saw a tide of conversions to Catholicism… The Hopis’ own oral tradition tells that Ta’polo, the chief of Awatovi, grew so upset with the transformation of his village that he plotted in secret with the men of [the neighboring villages of] Walpi and Oraibi to wipe out his own town. One morning in late autumn 1700, the warriors attached when all the Awatovi men were inside their kivas; the attackers pulled up the ladders, set fire to the kivas, and burned the men alive. The whole village was razed….The tradition says further that a band of surviving men, women, and children was marched toward First Mesa, when a dispute broke out between Walpi and Oraibi men over the disposition of the captives. Out of spite, the victors killed many of the prisoners and left their carcasses on the ground. —Roberts/Old Ones, p. 161

This is, perhaps, more disturbing than Anasazi cannibalism a thousand years ago. The distance of a thousand years allows us to be a little less shocked and a little more analytical or clinical.

But three hundred years ago? Especially in response to Catholicism, meaning the Puebloans targeted and attempted to eradicate Christians much as Hitler tried to erase Jews—that’s hard to take. Especially in the face of repeated denials by modern Puebloans that such horrible things happened back in Anasazi times.

Evidence of Anasazi cannibalism is both prehistoric and historic

Physical anthropologist Christy G. Turner II of Arizona State University has been gradually amassing evidence from bones recovered from sites throughout the Four Corners region to support his argument that the ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians had engaged in cannibalism. His evidence comes from bones recovered at sites both from the prehistoric Anasazi cultures and from historic-era sites on Polacca Wash on the Hopi reservation in Arizona dates to A.D. 1580, plus or minus seventy years. —Frazier/Chaco, p. 237

The fact that there is historic evidence for Hopi cannibalism, with further evidence that it extends from their ancestors the Anasazi, is powerful. The Hopi are a secretive people and they—rightfully so—dislike Westerners busting into their history and myths.

But the bones don’t lie. They may be misinterpreted, but the facts are there for all to see.

When we wonder if the practices of cannibalism carried forward from the Anasazi into more modern times, the answer appears to be yes, it did.

Were the Awatovi victims cannibalized?

[Remains of] some thirty murdered Puebloans [were unearthed] at Polacca Wash, below First Mesa. To [Turner’s] surprise, the criteria for cannibalism fit. A radiocarbon date placed the remains within a range close to A.D. 1700. “I’m ninety-five percent sure that the massacre at Polacca Wash represents the captives from Awatovi,” Turner told me. “And there’s no doubt they were cannibalized.” —Roberts/Old Ones, p. 162

This is truly shocking.

The oral histories collected by the first Europeans and early American ethnographers record echoes of atrocities, often denied by modern Anasazi descendants, but this is hard evidence that such things continued to happen more than a hundred years after the arrival of the Spanish.

What the early Spaniards and Catholic missionaries did to the Puebloans is bad enough.

In 1599, “Don Juan de Oñate and 129 soldiers attacked and captured Acoma Pueblo, mutilating many survivors by cutting off hands and feet as punishment.” —Roberts/Old Ones, p. 91)

But what the Puebloans did to their own was worse. Much worse. More like what their ancestors, the Anasazi, did to each other.

The final question: Was Chaco a flash-in-the-pan of unthinkable hubris?

As I pondered the Anasazi, I thought about Chaco Canyon. Christy Tuner’s bone collection had convinced me of the reality of Anasazi cannibalism, a truth it is hard to countenance in any form, and if his and David Wilcox’s speculations were correct, this dark side of Anasazi life was intimately linked to the rise of Chaco…. Had the Chaco Phenomenon been a spectacular aberration, a two-hundred-year meteor of bloody and brilliant arrogance flashing and dying across the blank sky of centuries in which the Anasazi co-existed in harmony? —Roberts/Old Ones, p. 216

Sigh. The dark side of Anasazi life was intimately linked to the rise of Chaco.

It does indeed appear to be so.

Chaco doesn’t represent the culmination of a great Native American culture. It, rather, represents mankind gone as horribly wrong as the Nazi phenomenon of the 1930s and 1040s.

Chaco is a black stain on the landscape of prehistoric North America.

Archaeologists are as uncomfortable with cannibalism as creationists are with the fossil record

Tim White, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley…, argues that…archaeologists go out of their way to avoid the cannibal explanation. “In the final analysis,” White wrote in an e-mail, “many anthropologists are as uncomfortable with cannibalism as creationists are with the fossil record for evolution. Both are likely to remain in denial until replaced with another generation of folks.” —Witze/Researchers Divided

In the modern climate, we could say that Americans are as uncomfortable with scientific facts as Anasazi farmers must have been of wandering cannibal warriors.

Resistance to any truth counter to our collective fantasies is an enduring characteristic of humans.

Conclusion

Most of the interpretation of Anasazi cannibalism comes from the work of a team headed by one man, physical anthropologist Christy G. Turner II of Arizona State University. His compilation of evidence, Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest, is detailed, compelling, and even gruesome.

Modern descendants of the Anasazi don’t like what he has to say. Most Anasazi archaeologists don’t like it, either. Heck, any reasonable person wouldn’t like it. I don’t either.

But Turner makes such a strong case, I can’t deny that the bones of people during Anasazi times show conclusive evidence that they were treated just like the bones of game animals that were consumed as food.

That the Anasazi used cannibalism as a force for social control is more speculative. And yet, it makes a kind of sense. How else would a minority exert enough control over a diverse and widely dispersed group of farmers and hunters to compel them to build enormous stone buildings; useless (from a practical sense) long, wide, and straight roads; and celestial observatories on mountain foothill mesa tops?

Would some kind of religious fervor compel them to expend that kind of energy? Perhaps. But why, then, the terror of cannibalism?

A case could be made, I suppose, that the widespread religious-type fervor could have resulted in both the enormous building projects, as well as pointed persecution (of witches?) that left evidence of cannibalism.

Which seems most farfetched to you? What else might explain the evidence? How does all this make you feel? (Not hungry, I hope.)

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This is background research for…

The Next Skywatcher: Prequel to The Last Skywatcher Triple Trilogy Series

Warning! This story contains graphic violence including cannibalism.

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Image Credits

Haunting black-and-white image of wraithlike human holding a candle (which the Anasazi did not have) from “Nasty Witch Rock In Effect! Anasazi & Part 1 Full Sets,” on CVLTNation.com.

Image of Maasaw (aka Másaw), “Maasaw – God of Death,” by Carla Trujillo, collagraph print 2008, on her website.

Image of coprolite (not human) from a PowerPoint presentation (link downloads the PowerPoint file) by Ashley Moore-Rivera.

Image of Navajo Skinwalker (not an Anasazi witch, but they must have looked at least as fearsome) from “Native American Witchcraft- Thomas Scarponi,” March 26, 2013, on PSU.edu (that’s Penn State University).

Image of Darwin vs. Jesus from “BEYOND Evolution vs. Creation,” November 27, 2011, on 3-D Christianity.

Image of End Ethnic Cleansing from “Complicity in Ethnic Cleansing,” by Dr. Ron Forthofer, July 27, 2014, on The Globe Monitor.

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