Cannibalism in the Americas

Cannibalism in the Americas has been practiced in many places throughout much of the history of North America and South America. The modern term "cannibal" is derived from the name of the Island Caribs (Kalinago), who were encountered by Christopher Columbus in The Bahamas. While numerous cultures in the Americas were reported by European explorers and colonizers to have engaged in cannibalism, some of these claims may be unreliable since the Spanish Empire used them to justify conquest.
At least some cultures have been physically and archeologically proven beyond any doubt whatsoever to have undertaken institutionalized cannibalism. This includes human bones uncovered in a cave hamlet confirming accounts of the Xiximes undertaking ritualized raids as part of their agricultural cycle after every harvest. Also proven are the Aztec ritual ceremonies during the Spanish conquest at Tecoaque. The Anasazi in the 12th century have also been demonstrated to have undertaken cannibalism, possibly due to drought, as shown by proteins from human flesh found in recovered feces.
There is near universal agreement that some Mesoamericans practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism, but there is no scholarly consensus as to its extent. Anthropologist Marvin Harris, author of Cannibals and Kings, has suggested that the flesh of the victims was a part of an aristocratic diet as a reward since the Aztec diet was lacking in proteins. According to Harris, the Aztec economy would not support feeding enslaved people (the captured in war), and the columns of prisoners were "marching meat." Conversely, Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano has proposed that Aztec cannibalism coincided with harvest times and should be considered more of a Thanksgiving. Montellano rejects the theories of Harner and Harris, saying that with evidence of so many tributes and intensive chinampa agriculture, the Aztecs did not need any other food sources. William Arens' 1979 book The Man-Eating Myth claimed that "there is no firm, substantiable evidence for the socially accepted practice of cannibalism anywhere in the world, at any time in history", but his views have been largely rejected as irreconcilable with the actual evidence.
In later times, cannibalism has occasionally been practiced as a last resort by people suffering from famine. Well-known examples include the ill-fated Donner Party (1846–1847) and the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 (1972), after which the survivors ate the bodies of the dead. Additionally, there are cases of people engaging in cannibalism for sexual pleasure, such as Albert Fish and Jeffrey Dahmer.
In early Brazil, there was the occurrence of cannibalism among the Tupinamba. An analysis by Anne B. McGinness argues that the way different Christian missionaries reacted to cannibalism influenced the success or failure of their attempts to convert the Tupinamba to Christianity. Missionaries sometimes received threats of cannibalism, including from Tupinamba women, but some missionaries continued their conversion attempts.
When Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed on a glacier in the Andes on October 13, 1972, the survivors resorted to eating the deceased during their 72 days in the mountains. Their experiences and memories became the source of several books and films. Survivor Roberto Canessa described how they "agonized" for days in the knowledge that "the bodies of our friends and team-mates, preserved outside in the snow and ice, contained vital, life-giving protein that could help us survive. But could we do it?" Ultimately he and the other 15 people who were rescued months later decided they could, realizing there was no other way to face off starvation.
European explorers and colonizers brought home many stories of cannibalism practiced by the native peoples they encountered. In Spain's overseas expansion to the New World, the practice of cannibalism was reported by Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean islands, and the Caribs were greatly feared because of their supposed practice of it. Queen Isabel of Castile had forbidden the Spaniards to enslave the indigenous unless they were "guilty" of cannibalism. Despite this, some writers of the first accounts of alleged Carib cannibalism were unconcerned about cannibalism or even wrote positively about the people. The credibility of the Caribs' long-standing reputation as eaters of human flesh is further supported by their legends, which were recorded in the 17th century, as well as by archaeological evidence.
The accusation of cannibalism quickly became a pretext for attacks on Indigenous groups and justification for the Spanish conquest. In Yucatán, a shipwrecked Spaniard Jerónimo de Aguilar, who later became a translator for Hernán Cortés, reported to have witnessed fellow Spaniards sacrificed and eaten but escaped from captivity where he was being fattened for sacrifice himself. The Florentine Codex (1576), compiled by Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún from information provided by indigenous eyewitnesses, includes depictions of Mexica (Aztec) cannibalism. Franciscan friar Diego de Landa reported on further Yucatán instances.
In February 1864, eight Haitians – four men and four women – were convicted to death and executed for having murdered and cannibalized a girl in a Vodou ritual held in a village near Port-au-Prince. Accounts of the trial vary regarding the girl's age – reported to range from seven to twelve – but are otherwise largely in agreement. The niece of one of the men was kidnapped while her mother was away, and a few days later, "strangled, flayed, decapitated and dismembered" in a sacrificial ritual allegedly held to make her uncle wealthy. Her remains were then cooked and eaten, with some evidence indicating that more than the eight people found guilty might have eaten her flesh. There are two other accounts of cannibalistic Vodou ceremonies by self-claimed eyewitnesses from the 1870s and 1880s, but their reliability is disputed.
Various European visitors and inhabitants of the country thought that cannibalism was reasonably common and was practiced not only in the context of human sacrifices but also for gastronomic reasons. Sir Spenser St. John, the British chargé d'affaires in Haiti in the 1860s, collected many such accounts in a controversial book first published in 1884. While allowing that only a minority of Vodou worshippers engaged in or approved of human sacrifice, St. John recorded several cases where children were sacrificed and eaten in Vodou ceremonies, reported by people who said to have witnessed them in person. He also referred to records of a case where the police supposedly found "packages of salted human flesh", but for fear of causing a scandal, chose not to investigate further.
Not all reports of cannibalism collected by St. John related to religious ceremonies. A French merchant told him he had once seen a group of soldiers beating a man; when he inquired about the reason, they ordered the man "to open his basket, and there he saw the body of a child cut up into regular joints." St. John spoke with a woman who had seen how "human flesh was openly sold in the market" in the countryside, and other witnesses stated the same. There are also newspaper reports of quartered children sold as food in the Christmas season, of the remains of partially eaten children being found, and of a man who accidentally ate some of "the leg of a child served to him as part of his dinner."
St. John's Spanish colleague told him that many children disappeared during certain seasons without a trace; while nothing more was known with certainty, people generally assumed most of them had been eaten. Similarly, the British captain William Kennedy heard from an Anglican clergyman that children were "stolen, butchered, and their flesh sold" in markets throughout the country. The clergyman's wife had once nearly purchased a chunk of human flesh, "believing it to be pork". Kennedy also heard of a family feast where a little boy had been consumed and spoke with a man who had seen barrels filled with human flesh offered for sale in western Haitian.
Mike Dash notes that evidence for the claims made by St. John and other observers that cannibalism was "a normal feature" of Haitian life is nevertheless thin. While the custom does not seem to have been unknown or universally shunned, estimates made by some Europeans, according to which "forty Haitians were eaten" every day and "almost every citizen of the country had tasted human flesh", were presumably widely exaggerated, reflecting prejudices more than reality.
There is universal agreement that some Mesoamerican people practiced human sacrifice followed by cannibalism. Still, there is a lack of scholarly consensus on how widespread the latter practice was. At one extreme, the anthropologist Marvin Harris, author of Cannibals and Kings, has suggested that the flesh of the victims was a part of an aristocratic diet as a reward since the Aztec diet was lacking in proteins. While most historians of the pre-Columbian era accept that there was ritual cannibalism related to human sacrifices, they often reject suggestions that human flesh could have been a significant portion of the Aztec diet. Cannibalism was also associated with acts of warfare, and has been interpreted as an element of blood revenge in war.
The Mexica of the Aztec period are perhaps the most widely studied of the ancient Mesoamerican peoples. While most pre-Columbian historians believe that ritual cannibalism took place in the context of human sacrifices, they do not support Harris' thesis that human flesh was ever a significant portion of the Aztec diet. Michael D. Coe states that while "it is incontrovertible that some of these victims ended up by being eaten ritually […], the practice was more like a form of communion than a cannibal feast".
Documentation of Aztec cannibalism mainly dates from the period after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519-1521). For instance, a convoy ordered by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar was cannibalized by the Aztecs in Zultépec-Tecoaque in 1520. In the Nahuatl language, the name "Tecoaque" translates into "the place where they ate them." For eight months, the convoy was ritually sacrificed, and their heads were put up on skull racks. Both men and women were sacrificed, including pregnant women. At least one 3-or-4-year-old child was also sacrificed during the ritual, and the town's population swelled to 5,000 as people arrived for the ceremonies. In 1521, Hernán Cortés and his forces arrived and, in an act of revenge, massacred the town's inhabitants, who were mostly women and children.
Conversely, in his widely criticized book, The Man-Eating Myth, Arens writes, "The gradual transformation of what little evidence is available for Aztec cannibalism is also an indication of the continual need to legitimize the Conquest". The following claims could have been exaggerated.
Bernal Díaz's True History of the Conquest of New Spain (written by 1568, published 1632) contains several accounts of cannibalism among the people the conquistadors encountered during their warring expedition to Tenochtitlan.
Díaz's testimony is corroborated by other Spanish historians who wrote about the conquest. In History of Tlaxcala (written by 1585), Diego Muñoz Camargo (c. 1529–1599) states that: "Thus there were public butcher's shops of human flesh, as if it were of cow or sheep."
Accounts of the Aztec Empire as a "Cannibal Kingdom", Marvin Harris's expression, have been commonplace from Bernal Díaz to Harris, William H. Prescott and Michael Harner. Harner has accused his colleagues, especially those in Mexico, of downplaying the evidence of Aztec cannibalism. Ortiz de Montellano argues that the Aztec diet was balanced and that the dietary contribution of cannibalism would not have been very effective as a reward.
As recently as 2008, Mexico's National Institute of Archaeology and History (INAH) derided as a "myth" the historical accounts by Jesuit missionaries reporting ritual cannibalism among the Xiximes people of northern Mexico. But in 2011, archaeologist José Luis Punzo, director of INAH, reported evidence confirming that the Xiximes did indeed practice cannibalism. More than three dozen bones were uncovered inside a cave hamlet that showed distinct signs of butchering and defleshing, confirming contemporary European accounts of the Xiximes. Typically, lone men from other tribes would be targeted, and their bodies would be broken apart at the joints and then cooked. The meat was then mixed with beans and corn into a soup. Tribes of the Xiximes practiced cannibalism in the belief that eating the souls of their enemies and hanging their bones from trees would bring about good crop yields next year, and thus conducted cannibalistic raids as part of their agricultural cycle after every harvest.
The 1913 Handbook of Indians of Canada (reprinting 1907 material from the Bureau of American Ethnology) ascribed former cannibal practices to dozens of North American Indigenous groups. The forms of cannibalism described included both resorting to human flesh during famines and ritual cannibalism, the latter often consisting of eating just a small portion of an enemy warrior. From another source, according to Hans Egede, when the Inuit killed a woman accused of witchcraft, they ate a portion of her heart.
As with most lurid tales of native cannibalism, these stories are treated with a great deal of scrutiny, as accusations of cannibalism could be used as justifications for the subjugation or destruction of "savages". English professor Patrick Brantlinger suggests that Indigenous peoples that were colonized were being dehumanized as part of the justification for the atrocities.
Human bones dated to the 12th century found at around 40 sites throughout the American Southwest possess clear markings of being butchered and cooked. The defleshing and dismemberment of some bodies are the same as that of animals used for food. The episodes were undertaken at Anasazi sites and may have been caused by a drought. At one settlement, human feces have been found containing the proteins of human flesh, conclusively showing the occurrence of cannibalism.
There is archaeological and written evidence for English settlers' cannibalism in 1609 in the Jamestown Colony under famine conditions, during a period which became known as Starving Time.
Travelers through sparsely inhabited regions and explorers of unknown areas sometimes ate human flesh after running out of other provisions. In a famous example from the 1840s, the members of Donner Party found themselves stranded by snow in the Donner Pass, a high mountain pass in California, without adequate supplies during the Mexican–American War, leading to several instances of cannibalism, including the murder of two young Native American men for food. Sir John Franklin's lost polar expedition, which took place at approximately the same time, is another example of cannibalism out of desperation.
In frontier situations where there was no strong authority, some individuals got used to killing and eating others, even in situations where other food would have been available. One notorious case was the mountain man Boone Helm, who became known as the "Kentucky Cannibal" for eating several of his fellow travelers from 1850 until his eventual hanging in 1864.
In 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was arrested after one of his intended victims managed to escape. Found in Dahmer's apartment were two human hearts, an entire torso, a bag full of human organs from his victims, and a portion of an arm muscle. He stated that he planned to consume all of the body parts over the next few weeks.