“It’s a given that, in numbers terms, the 20th Century was the most violent in history, with civil war, purges and two World Wars killing as many as 200 million people. But on a per-capita basis, Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler has documented a particularly bloody period more than eight centuries ago on what is now American soil. Between 1140 and 1180, in the central Mesa Verde ofsouthwest Colorado, four relatively peaceful centuries of pueblo living devolved into several decades of violence.
Writing in the journal American Antiquity, Kohler and his colleagues at WSU and at the University of Colorado-Boulder document how nearly nine out of ten sets of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms. “If we’re identifying that much trauma, many were dying a violent death,” said Kohler, whose study was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Yet at the same time, in the northern Rio Grande region of what is now New Mexico, people had far less while experiencing similar growth and, ostensibly, population pressures. Viewed together, said Kohler, the two areas offer a view into what motivates violence in some societies but not others. The study also offers more clues to the mysterious depopulation of the northern Southwest, from a population of about 40,000 people in the mid-1200s to none 30 years later.”
An excerpt.
If the ancient Indian civilizations had the same weaponry that existed in the 20th century, does anyone think the warfare would have been any less in the numbers of casualties? I doubt it. It’s my understanding that many Indian tribes exterminated other tribes several times prior to Columbus.
“Aztec cannibalism and human sacrifice (especially at the dedication of the great pyramid of Huitzilopochtli in 1487) on a scale approaching the daily murder rate at Auschwitz are seldom discussed as a part of the Mexican past.”
Mexifornia, Victor Davis Hanson, pg.76