Post by wizard on Oct 20, 2014 14:46:35 GMT
By David Ferguson
Tuesday, August 5, 2014 9:07 EDT
After building a thriving society over centuries, one Native American society in the 12th century underwent a violent collapse that left the southwestern region of what is now the U.S. virtually depopulated.
According to a report from WSU, the years between 1140 and 1180 A.D. were the bloodiest per capita years on North American soil, with an astonishing nine of ten corpses exhumed from the era showing signs of death by traumatic injuries to the head and arms.
"If we’re identifying that much trauma, many were dying a violent death," said lead author Tim Kohler.
"The central Mesa Verde and the northern Rio Grande regions housed two of the densest populations of prehispanic Pueblo peoples in the North American Southwest," wrote the study authors in the journal American Antiquity. "We plot incidence of violent trauma on human bone through time in each region. Such violence peaked in the mid-A.D. 1100s in the central Mesa Verde, and in general was higher through time there than in the northern Rio Grande region."
Tuesday, August 5, 2014 9:07 EDT
After building a thriving society over centuries, one Native American society in the 12th century underwent a violent collapse that left the southwestern region of what is now the U.S. virtually depopulated.
According to a report from WSU, the years between 1140 and 1180 A.D. were the bloodiest per capita years on North American soil, with an astonishing nine of ten corpses exhumed from the era showing signs of death by traumatic injuries to the head and arms.
"If we’re identifying that much trauma, many were dying a violent death," said lead author Tim Kohler.
"The central Mesa Verde and the northern Rio Grande regions housed two of the densest populations of prehispanic Pueblo peoples in the North American Southwest," wrote the study authors in the journal American Antiquity. "We plot incidence of violent trauma on human bone through time in each region. Such violence peaked in the mid-A.D. 1100s in the central Mesa Verde, and in general was higher through time there than in the northern Rio Grande region."
