Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/220

 206 call for an elaborate mythology to invest its rulers with the necessary civil power to hold the society together, and wield its combined strength against its foes from behind the walls that protected its women and children, and to till the soil and make its wares. The pottery, of which there must have been great quantities, from cooking-pots over twenty inches in diameter down to drinking-pots not over three inches in diameter, seems to have all been made from clay taken from three or four pits, and all baked in a single kiln.

There was probably some division of labor among them; some making pots, others tilling the fields, while still others made tools of various sorts, and still others may have followed the chase for meat-supplies. All the birds of which I found bones are migratory, and are found in that locality only during the period of the year in which the crops would need attention. The same is true of some of the fish upon which they fed.

"Whatever led to cannibalism among them fixed the habit so permanently in their lives as to lead them to relish human flesh. Every part of the body seems to have been eaten, which would not be true of those cannibals that eat their enemies for revenge or in religious sacrifices. In those cases they seldom eat more than small portions selected according to the demand of some superstition that does not apply to all of the body, even to the marrow.

The fact that such ornaments as the shell beads, which must have been highly prized by their owners, were thrown with the bones into the common garbage-heap of the village would seem to indicate that the person eaten, and whose bones and ornaments found a common fate among the bones of food-animals, was alien to the eaters.

Then, too, very wide differences of anatomical conformations exist between the bones in the garbage-heap and those buried in the burial mounds adjacent to the village. This confirms the notion that the victims eaten must have been taken by the chase, or as prisoners of war. The bones indicate all ages, from children of tender years to aged men and women. There seems to have been no discrimination as to the age and sex of the victim, as is generally the case when a human body is eaten in religious or social orgies. Such are the facts in confirmation of this habit having existed among a people of a high order of barbarism.

The manner in which, and the length of time it was practiced by them, would indicate as its cause the development of a relish for human flesh through a scarcity of food. The very fact that they were populous, and subsisting in a latitude that has hard and long winters, together with the uncertainties of the returns from their primitive agriculture, would confirm the notion that hunger was its cause, and that its pressure never was unfelt until the relish