Cowboy Wash: A Dark Chapter in the Ancient Record
Near Cortez, Colorado
About fifteen miles west of Mesa Verde, in an area of canyon country called Cowboy Wash, archaeologists excavated sites in the nineteen nineties that raised some of the most disturbing questions in the study of Ancestral Puebloan society. The sites date to approximately eleven fifty to eleven seventy five of the common era, a period of severe drought and regional stress across the Four Corners. The remains of twelve individuals were found at the site, seven of them scattered and showing signs of deliberate processing, while the other five were intact, formal burials.
Physical anthropologists documented marks consistent with deliberate defleshing, the fracturing of long bones to extract marrow, and burning. Researcher Richard Marlar conducted laboratory analysis of a coprolite found in one of the fire hearths and identified human myoglobin, a protein found only in human muscle tissue, a result that scientists regarded as direct biochemical evidence of the consumption of human remains. The interpretation of that evidence remains debated among scholars.
Some argue that the processing reflects ritualized violence against individuals accused of witchcraft or sorcery, practices documented in later Pueblo oral traditions as a response to community crisis. Others interpret it as evidence of famine-driven desperation during extreme drought. The sites were abandoned abruptly, with household goods left in place, suggesting the survivors fled.
Whatever occurred at Cowboy Wash, the evidence complicates any picture of Ancestral Puebloan society as uniformly peaceful, and reflects the extreme pressures that can fall on any community facing generational drought and collapse.
