PEOPLE EATING

CHAPTER TEN

PEOPLE EATING

THE PUZZLE of cannibalism concerns the socially sanctioned consumption of human flesh when other foods are available. I am not going to explain the practice of people eating when the only food available is human flesh. That kind of people eating occurs the world over from time to time regardless of whether the eaters and the eaten come from societies that approve or disapprove of the practice. There is no puzzle as to why they do it. Sailors adrift in lifeboats, travelers snowbound in alpine passes, and people trapped in besieged cities sometimes must eat each other’s corpses or die of starvation. Our puzzle is not concerned with such emergencies but with people eating each other when they have access to alternative sources of nourishment.

In order to explain the preference for or against nonemergency consumption of human flesh, a further distinction must be made. One must recognize that, as in every puzzling foodway, production precedes consumption. Before we can understand why some cultures prefer and others detest human flesh, we must confront the question of how people eaters supply themselves with their human repast. Basically, there are just two ways to obtain an edible corpse; either the eaters forcibly hunt, capture, and kill the eaten, or the eaters peacefully acquire the body of a relative who has died a natural death. Peaceful acquisition and consumption of bodies or parts of bodies is an aspect of mourning rituals; the acquisition of bodies through violent means is an aspect of warfare. These two modes of cannibal production have entirely different sets of costs and benefits and hence cannot be subsumed under a single explanatory theory. (Note that I have ruled out the peaceful acquisition of the bodies of strangers through purchase. Corpses are seldom for sale. Diego Rivera’s claim that he thrived on cadavers bought from the Mexico City morgue when he was an anatomy student should probably be taken with a grain of salt—the great painter was much given to what his biographer called “myth making.”)

Although the mortuary customs of many band and village societies called for the consumption of portions of the remains of dead relatives, only the ashes, carbonized flesh, or ground-up bones of the deceased were generally ingested. These vestiges were not a significant source of proteins or calories (although in tropical habitats ashes and bones could have been an important means of recycling scarce minerals). Consumption of the ashes and bones of a deceased loved one was a logical extension of cremation. After the body of the deceased had been consumed by the flames, the ashes were often collected and kept in containers to be finally disposed of by ingesting them—usually mixed in a beverage (which seems to be a lot tidier than scattering them in the Ganges or, as recently proposed, rocketing them into outer space). Another common mode of disposing of the dead was to bury the corpse and wait for the flesh to be cleaned off (which would not take more than a few days in tropical soils). Some or all of the bones would then be exhumed with loving care and reburied inside the family house or put in baskets and hung from the rafters. As a final step the bones would then be pulverized, mixed with a beverage, and mournfully consumed.

Here is an anthropologist’s eyewitness description of mortuary cannibalism among the Guiaca, a village people of the upper Orinoco River in South America:

We ourselves have observed several instances of the cremation of the deceased in the village plaza on the day of his death, the careful collection of the half-carbonized bones from the ashes, and the grinding of these bones in a wooden mortar. The resulting powder was poured into little calabashes and given to the dead person’s closest relatives who kept them near the roof of their hut. On ceremonial occasions … the relatives would put some of this powder into a large calabash half full of plantain soup and drink the mixture accompanied by lamentations. The family was very careful not to spill any of it….

Travelers, missionaries, and scientists report that Amazonian groups practiced a number of interesting variations on this basic theme. The Craquieto, for example, roasted a dead chief over a slow fire until the corpse was entirely dry, wrapped the mummified remains in a fresh new hammock, and hung it in the chief’s abandoned hut. After several years the relatives held a big feast, burned the mummy, and drank the ashes mixed with chicha, a fermented beverage made from maize. Several cultures buried their corpses, exhumed them after a year, and drank the powder made from the burnt bones with chicha or some other fermented beverage. Some groups waited as long as fifteen years before exhuming the bones and grinding them up. Some groups ate the ashes. The Cunibo burned only the hair of a dead child and swallowed the ashes with food or fish broth. Although reports of people consuming roasted portions of the flesh of the deceased also exist, they are far less common than the reports of the consumption of ashes or ground-up bones and lack authentic details concerning the degree of carbonization of the flesh.

I believe that this indifference to the potential food value of peacefully acquired corpses (as opposed to bodies violently acquired through warfare) partially reflects the inefficient and health-threatening nature of such food resources; inefficient because most natural deaths are preceded by a considerable weight loss leaving too little flesh to justify the expense of cooking the corpse; and health-threatening because of the likelihood that the deceased succumbed to or was weakened by a communicable disease. (In contrast, individuals killed or captured through warfare are likely to have been well nourished and in good health before meeting their fate. In this regard, Diego Rivera’s account has an air of authenticity. He claims that he and his companions only ate the bodies of persons who had died of violence—“who had been freshly killed and were not diseased or senile.”) The burial and carbonization of bodies of the dead reflect, it seems to me, a cultural recognition through trial and error of the physical dangers of disposing of the dead by eating them or by keeping their decomposing remains near the living. This cannot be the whole explanation, since, as I have argued with respect to insects, pork, and dead cows and horses, vigorous cooking greatly reduces their health-threatening qualities. There would be social danger as well. Cannibalism practiced on the whole fresh corpse of a relative might easily fan the flames of suspicion and mutual mistrust. In fact or fancy there would be members of the local group who seemed all too eager to make a meal of the sick and dying. (Band and village peoples—in fact almost all premodern groups—lack a concept of natural death and attribute the death of a relative to malevolent forces and witchcraft.) Carbonization of the fresh body, or burial, reduces the suspicions that are at peak level just after the loved one has died at the same time that it reduces the exposure to disease. In situations in which significant nourishment was obtained from a relative’s corpse, the eaters were probably under considerable stress from protein-calorie malnutrition so that the benefits of eating the body without carbonizing it or leaving it buried until the bones were clean outweighed the risks of disease or accusations of sorcery.

This at least appears to be the explanation for corpse eating by relatives among the Foré of highland New Guinea. D. Carleton Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1976 for relating the Foré’s practice of eating their relatives to a disease caused by a “slow virus”—a type of pathogen previously unknown but since linked to many other diseases, including cancer. As among other New Guinea highlanders, Foré mortuary rituals obliged female relatives of the deceased to bury the corpse in a shallow grave. Traditionally, after an interval of unknown duration, the women exhumed the bones and cleaned them but did not eat any of the flesh. During the 1920s the women changed this practice, possibly to compensate for a decline in the rations of meat they were able to obtain from their menfolk. They exhumed the corpse after only two or three days and began to eat the entire body cut from the bones and cooked in bamboo cylinders along with fern leaves and other greens. (Because of the high altitude at which the Foré live, boiling was not an effective defense against contaminated food.) Three decades later the Foré began to make headlines as the victims of a previously unknown fatal “laughing disease,” called “kuru.” In the advanced stages of kuru the victims—mostly women—lost control of their facial muscles, creating the impression that they were laughing themselves to death. The research for which Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize revealed that kuru was caused by a “slow virus” probably transmitted as a consequence of the Foré’s unusual mortuary rituals—the handling of the partially decomposed corpse and the consumption of its flesh.

Since neither Gajdusek nor other anthropologists who have lived with the Foré actually witnessed the eating of human flesh, the suggestion has been made that the virus was spread merely by contact with the corpse rather than by consumption of infected morsels. Yet Foré women themselves freely told several researchers that they had previously engaged in mortuary cannibalism. Their decision to consume the corpse’s ripe flesh may very well have had a nutritional motivation. Although no study of the diet of the Foré at the time they adopted mortuary cannibalism was ever made, later studies show that the usual pattern of unequal distribution of animal foods among men and women probably prevailed. In Gajdusek’s time, after the suppression of cannibalism, daily consumption of protein by females was only 56 percent of recommended allowances, and virtually all of it was of plant origin. As among many South American groups, men appropriated the flesh of large animals for themselves, leaving frogs, small game, and insects for the women and children. And as expected, the Foré have a very high level of witchcraft accusations against women. Presumably, similar adverse effects upon health and social cohesion often accompanied attempts by other cultures to consume the bodies of relatives and neighbors in conjunction with mortuary rituals, helping to limit the popularity of such practices. Let me turn now to the explanation of the more common of the nutritionally significant forms of people eating, namely, cannibalism practiced on forcibly acquired bodies.

Powerful sanctions everywhere prevent adult members of primary groups from killing and eating each other. In fact the taboo against killing and eating one’s relatives is the most fundamental precondition if people are to live together and cooperate on a daily basis. This taboo automatically means that if cannibalism is to be practiced on forcibly acquired bodies, such bodies must be obtained from socially distant individuals—from strangers or from outright enemies. In other words, they can only be acquired as a result of some variety of armed conflict. Since warfare aptly characterizes most of the armed conflict leading to the forcible acquisition of human bodies, I shall refer to this variety of cannibalism as “warfare cannibalism.”

We owe one of the earliest and most complete eyewitness accounts of warfare cannibalism to Hans Staden, a shipwrecked German naval gunner who was taken captive by the Tupinamba Indians of Brazil. Staden spent nine months in 1554 in a Tupinamba village before escaping and making his way back to Europe. What Staden saw with his own eyes was the ritual torture of prisoners of war, their dismemberment, and the cooking, distribution, and consumption of their flesh. Staden does not specify exactly how many cannibal incidents he witnessed, but he does describe three specific occasions on which he watched people being cooked and eaten, adding up to a total of at least sixteen victims. Here is his general description of the fate of Tupinamba prisoners of war:

When they first bring home a captive the women and children set upon him and beat him. Then they decorate him with grey feathers and shave off his eyebrows, and dance around him, having first bound him securely so that he cannot escape. They give him a woman who attends to him and has intercourse with him ….

They feed the prisoner well and keep him for a time while they prepare the pots which are to contain their drink…. When all is ready they fix the day of his death and invite the savages from the neighbouring villages to be present. The drinking vessels are filled a few days in advance, and before the women make the drink, they bring forth the prisoner once or twice to the place where he is to die and dance around him.

When the guests have assembled, the chief of the huts bids them welcome and desires that they shall help them to eat their enemy…. they paint the face of the victim, the women singing while another woman paints, and when they begin to drink they take their captive with them and talk to him while he drinks with them. After the drinking bout is over they rest the next day and build a hut on the place of execution, in which the prisoner spends the night under close guard. Then, a good while before daybreak on the day following, they commence to dance and sing before the club [that the executioner will use], and so they continue until day breaks. After this they take the prisoner from his hut…. they place stones beside him which he throws at the women, who run about mocking him and boasting that they will eat him. These women are painted, and are ready to take his four quarters when he is cut up, and run with them around the huts.

Then they make a fire about two paces from the prisoner which he has to tend. After this a woman brings the club … shrieking with joy, and running to and fro before the prisoner so that he may see it. Then a man takes the club and standing before the prisoner he shows it to him. Meanwhile he who is going to do the deed withdraws with fourteen or fifteen others, and they all paint their bodies grey with ashes. Then the slayer returns with his companions, and the man who holds the club before the prisoner hands it to the slayer. At this stage the [headman] approaches, and taking the club he thrusts it once between the slayer’s legs which is a sign of great honour. Then the slayer seizes it and thus addresses the victim: “I am he that will kill you, since you and yours have slain and eaten many of my friends.” To which the prisoner replies: “When I am dead I shall still have many to avenge my death.” Then the slayer strikes from behind and beats out his brains.

The women seize the body at once and carry it to the fire where they scrape off the skin, making the flesh quite white, and stopping up the fundament with a piece of wood so that nothing may be lost. Then a man cuts up the body, removing the legs above the knee and the arms at the trunk, whereupon the four women seize the four limbs and run with them around the huts, making a joyful cry. After this they divide the trunk among themselves and devour everything that can be eaten.

When this is finished they all depart, each one carrying a piece with him. The slayer takes a fresh name…. He must lie all that day in his hammock, but they give him a small bow and an arrow so that he can amuse himself by shooting into wax, lest his arm should become feeble from the shock of the death blow. I was present and have seen all this with my own eyes.

Before I try to explain the cost/benefit basis of Tupinamba people eating and of warfare cannibalism in general, let me confront the issue of whether or not Staden’s description is truthful. In his popular book, The Man-Eating Myth, anthropologist William Arens claims that Staden’s account, like all other accounts of cannibalism (except for emergency cannibalism) is a tall tale. Arens advances three arguments to discredit Staden’s account. Staden could not have translated verbatim the words of his Tupinamba captors right from the first day of his captivity because he didn’t speak Tupi-Guarani, the native language; Staden reconstructed cannibal events in impossibly precise detail nine years after they allegedly took place; and Staden relied on John Dryander, a German doctor, to help him fake the manuscript. Another anthropologist, Donald Forsyth, has refuted these claims. Staden was in fact a member of an expedition led by the Spanish captain Diego de Sanabria, which set sail from Seville in the spring of 1549. Two of the expedition’s three ships made it to a Brazilian harbor near modern-day Florianópolis. The larger of the two vessels sank in the harbor. For two years Staden and his shipwrecked companions kept themselves alive by trading salvaged items from their ships with Tupi-Guarani-speaking villagers in exchange for food. When the salvaged items were used up, the survivors split into two groups. Staden’s group took the small ship north along the coast. After another shipwreck, Staden and his companions reached the Portuguese settlement of São Vicente—the colonial forerunner of the modern-day port of Santos—in January 1553. For the next year Staden worked as a gunner for the Portuguese and was in close contact with at least one Tupi-Guarani-speaking native whom he described as his “slave” and who accompanied Staden on hunting expeditions. Staden was also well acquainted with other Tupi-Guarani-speaking residents of the Portuguese settlement.

In January 1554 a Tupinamba raiding party captured Staden and brought him back to their village. Staden spent the next nine months in constant fear of being killed and eaten. In September 1554 he eluded his captors, made his way to the coast, and was rescued by a French ship. The ship docked in Honfleur, Normandy, on or about 20 February 1555. On reaching his native Marburg, Germany, Staden quickly sought the help of Dr. John Dryander, a distinguished scholar and friend of Staden’s family. Staden’s motive in going to Dryander is clear from what Dryander says in the introduction to Staden’s book. Staden wanted someone of high repute to serve as a character witness and to vouch for his account:

I have known [Staden’s] father for upwards of fifty years, for he and I were born and taught in the same town, namely Wetter. Both in his home and in Hombert in Hesse where he now lives, he [i.e. the father] is looked upon as an upright, pious, and worthy man not unversed in the arts…. I believe that Hans Staden has faithfully reported his history and adventures from his own experience and not from the account of others, that he has no intent to deceive and that he desires no reward or worldly renown, but only the glory of God, in humble praise and faithfulness for his escape.

Staden’s book was finished at the latest in December 1556, less than two years after his return to Europe and less than three years after the date of his capture, although it was not actually published until early 1557. Forsyth has checked all of the principal facts, dates, and names by cross-reference to specific individuals mentioned by Staden as being at certain places and specified dates. From this resume it is clear that Staden spoke Spanish and Portuguese as well as German and had ample opportunity during the five years (1549 to 1554) which preceded his capture, to have learned Tupi-Guarani, that he did not delay nine years in writing down his experiences but two at the most; and that he asked for and received Dryander’s help not to invent and embellish a tall tale, but to assure the reader that he was a pious and honest man.

Other sixteenth-century accounts independently corroborate the fundamental pattern of warfare cannibalism as practiced by the Tupinamba. Jesuit missionaries to Brazil wrote hundreds of pages of letters and reports about the practice. Most of these Jesuits spent years traveling among and visiting Tupinamba villages and almost all of them had learned to speak Tupi-Guarani. Father José de Anchieta, for example, who mastered Tupi-Guarani sufficiently to compose the first grammar of that language, had this to say about cannibalism in 1554:

If they capture four or five of their enemies, they [immediately] return [to their village] to eat them at a great feast … such that not even the [prisoners’] nails are lost. They are proud all their lives because of this singular victory. Even the prisoners feel that they are being treated in a noble and excellent manner, asking for a glorious death, as they see it, for they say that only cowards and weaklings die and are buried and go to hold up the weight of the earth, which they believe to be extremely heavy.

Anchieta was no armchair ethnographer. He not only obtained information from talking with the Tupinamba but from traveling among and living in their villages where he recorded specific events, as in his account of the slaughter on 26 June 1553 of an enemy “slave.”

But in the afternoon when they were all full of wine, they came to the house where we were lodging and wanted to take the slave to kill [him]…. Like wolves the Indians pulled at him [the slave] with great fury; finally they took him outside and broke [open] his head, and together with him they killed another one of their enemies, whom they soon tore into pieces with great rejoicing, especially the women, who went around singing and dancing, some [of the women] pierced the cut off members [of the body] with sharp sticks, others smeared their hands with [the victim’s] fat and went about smearing [the fat on] the faces and mouths of others, and it was such that they gathered [the victim’s] blood in their hands and licked it, an abominable spectacle, such that they had a great slaughter on which to gorge themselves.

Another Jesuit father, Juan de Aspilcueta Navarro, wrote about a direct encounter with cannibalism in 1549 in a village near what is the modern-day city of Salvador.

… upon my arrival they told me that they had just finished killing a girl and they showed me the house, and when I entered it I found that they were cooking her to eat her, and the head was hung on a timber; and I began to chide and decry such an abominable thing and so against nature…. And afterwards I went to other houses in which I found the feet, hands, and heads of men in the smoke.

In a letter dated 28 March 1550, Navarro gave this additional eyewitness account:

One day many [of the men] from the villages where I teach went to war, and many of them were killed by their enemies. In order to avenge themselves, they returned [to the war] well prepared and treacherously killed many of their enemies, from which they brought much human flesh. Such that, when I went to visit one of the villages in which I teach … and upon entering the second house I found a pot like a large earthen jar in which they had human flesh cooking, and when I arrived they were taking out arms, feet, and heads of humans, which was a dreadful thing to see. I saw seven or eight old women who could barely keep themselves standing up dancing around the pot and stirring the fire, so that they looked like demons in hell.

Another Jesuit eyewitness of Tupinamba cannibal rituals was Father Antonio Blasquez. Writing in 1557, after being in Brazil for four years, Blasquez stated that the Indians find “their happiness by killing an enemy and afterwards, for vengeance, to eat his flesh … there is no other meat they like better.” Again, Blasquez was no armchair observer:

Six nude women came into the square singing in their manner and making such gestures and shaking that they seemed like devils; from their feet to their heads they were covered with something [that looked like] beetles [made] of yellow feathers; on their backs they had a bunch of feathers that looked like a horse’s mane, and in order to enliven the festivity they played flutes which are made of the shin bones of their enemies when they kill them. With this garb they walked [around] barking like dogs and mimicking speech with such grimacing that I don’t know what to compare them to. All of these inventions they do seven or eight days before killing them. Because at that time there were seven [prisoners to be killed], they made [the prisoners] run and throw stones and oranges, while their women held them prisoner with cords tied to their necks; even if [the prisoner] doesn’t want to, they make him throw oranges, challenging him to do so…. The [captives] are persuaded that in [participating] in those ceremonies, they are brave and strong, and if out of fear of death, they refuse to [participate], they call them weak and cowardly; and therefore to flee is, in their view, a great shame. They [i.e., the captives] do things when they are about to die which if you hadn’t seen it, you wouldn’t believe….

Naturally the Jesuits tried to stop the slaughter of prisoners. Again and again they relate how they personally confiscated cooked or smoked human flesh or whole bodies that were about to be cooked, and rescued or baptized prisoners who were about to be killed and eaten. If the Tupinamba did not in fact practice cannibalism, the Jesuits were not merely gullible consumers of nasty rumors, they must have been consummate liars. I refuse to believe Arens’s claim that they lied to each other, lied to their superiors in Rome, and lied in this manner continuously for over fifty years without a single word of protest from a single honest man among them.

Many eyewitness accounts attest to the existence of a similar complex of torture, ritual execution, and eating prisoners of war among other native American peoples, especially in northern New York State and southern Canada. For example, in 1652 the explorer, Peter Raddison, witnessed the consumption of one of his comrades: “They cut off some of the flesh of that miserable, broiled it and eat it.” Another explorer, Wentworth Greenhalgh, recorded the capture of fifty prisoners on 17 June 1677 near the Iroquois village of Cannagorah. On the next day Greenhalgh witnessed four men, four women, and one boy being tortured to death: “the cruelty lasted about seven hours, when they were almost dead, letting them loose to the mercy of the boys, and taking the hearts of such as were dead to feast on.”

As in the case of the Tupinamba, Jesuit missionaries provided the most detailed eyewitness accounts of Iroquois and Huron cannibalism. In a famous incident related by a Christianized Huron, the Iroquois tortured two missionaries to death and ate their hearts. The Jesuit superior, Father Regnaut, to whom the Huron had told the story, states that he himself had witnessed similar acts of torture and cannibalism. “I do not doubt all which I have just related [the Huron’s story] is true, and I would seal it with my blood, for I have seen the same treatment given to Iroquois prisoners whom the Huron savages have taken in war….”

The longest and most detailed eyewitness account of torture and cannibalism concerns the treatment of an Iroquois captive in the year 1637. Three missionaries were present—Father Paul le Jeune, Father Garnier, and the narrator, Father François le Mercier. The account begins with the prisoner entering the village singing and escorted by a crowd of people. He was “dressed in a beautiful beaver robe and wore a string of porcelain beads around his neck.” For two days his captors took good care of him, cleaned his wounds, and gave him fruits, squash, and dog meat to eat. In the evening they took him to the council’s long house:

The people gathered immediately, the old men taking places above, upon a sort of platform, which extends, on both sides, the entire length of the cabins. The young men were below, but were so crowded that they were almost piled upon one another, so that there was hardly a passage along the fires. Cries of joy resounded on all sides; each provided himself, one with a firebrand, another with a piece of bark, to burn the victim. Before he was brought in, the [chief] encouraged all to do their duty, representing to them the importance of this act, which was viewed, he said by the Sun and by the God of war. He ordered that at first they should burn only his legs, so that he might hold out until daybreak; also for that night they were not to go and amuse themselves in the woods [have sex].

The prisoner was then made to run a flaming gauntlet from one end of the long house to the other:

… each one struggled to burn him as he passed. Meanwhile, he shrieked like a lost soul; the whole crowd imitated his cries, or rather smothered them with horrible shouts…. The whole cabin appeared as if on fire; and, athwart the flames and the dense smoke that issued therefrom, these barbarians—crowding one upon the other, howling at the top of their voices, with firebrands in their hands, their eyes flashing with rage and fury—seemed like so many Demons who would give no respite to this poor wretch. They often stopped him at the other end of the cabin, some of them taking his hands and breaking the bones thereof by sheer force; others pierced his ears with sticks which they left in them; others bound his wrists with cords which they tied roughly, pulling at each end of the cord with all their might. Did he make the round and pause to take a little breath, he was made to repose upon hot ashes and burning coals. It is with horror that I describe all this to your Reverence, but verily we experienced unutterable pain while enduring the sight of it.

On the seventh round of the cabin the prisoner became unconscious. The chief then tried to revive him, poured water in his mouth and gave him corn to eat. When he was able to sing again the torture resumed.

They hardly burned him anywhere except in the legs, but these, to be sure, they reduced to a wretched state, the flesh being all in shreds. Some applied burning brands to them and did not withdraw them until he uttered loud cries; and, as soon as he ceased shrieking, they again began to burn him, repeating it seven or eight times—often reviving the fire, which they held close against the flesh, by blowing upon it. Others bound cords around him and then set them on fire, thus burning him slowly and causing him the keenest agony. There were some who made him put his feet on redhot hatchets, and then pressed down on them. You could have heard the flesh hiss, and have seen the smoke which issued therefrom rise even to the roof of the cabin. They struck him with clubs upon the head, and passed small sticks through his ears; they broke the rest of his fingers; they stirred up the fire all around his feet.

Finally, the prisoner lapsed again into unconsciousness, and this time was killed and dismembered and eaten:

They so harassed him upon all sides that they finally put him out of breath; they poured water into his mouth to strengthen his heart and the [chief] called out to him that he should take a little breath. But he remained still, his mouth open, and almost motionless. Therefore, fearing that he would die otherwise than by the knife, one cut off a foot, another a hand, and almost at the same time a third severed the head from the shoulders, throwing it into the crowd, where some one caught it to carry it to the [chief] for whom it had been reserved, in order to make a feast therewith. As for the trunk, it remained at Arontaen, where a feast was made of it the same day. We recommended his soul to God and returned home to say Mass. On the way we encountered a Savage who was carrying upon a skewer one of his half roasted hands.

I have quoted the Jesuits’ eyewitness accounts of cannibalism at length in order to refute Arens’s mischievous contention that “the collected documents of the Jesuit missionaries often referred to as the source for Iroquois cruelty and cannibalism, do not contain an eyewitness description of the latter deed.” It is true that the Jesuits’ eyewitness accounts of torture and cannibalism among the Iroquois and Huron provide more information regarding torture than the cooking and chewing part of the proceeding. But I think the reason for this is obvious. As eyewitnesses whose culture prohibited cannibalism, the Jesuits were revolted by the consumption of human flesh; but as men who were not accustomed to watching people being tortured (even though their European countrymen used torture on a larger scale than the Indians), they were far more appalled and revolted by the way the victims were killed than by how they were cooked.

Let me pause at this point to make some preliminary estimates of the costs and benefits of warfare cannibalism. If we regard warfare as a form of hunting organized to obtain meat, the costs far exceed the benefits. Humans are big animals, but it takes an immense effort just to capture a few of them. The hunted are as alert, evasive, and as well-informed about hunting as the hunters. And as a prey species, humans have another unique feature. Unlike tapirs, fish, or locusts, humans become less attractive as prey the more their numbers exceed the numbers hunting them. This is because they are the most dangerous prey in the world and are just as likely to kill some of their pursuers as to be killed by them. On the basis of optimal foraging theory, one would seldom expect hunters to take humans on encounter. They would be better off to pass them by in favor of palm grubs and spiders.

But warfare cannibals are not hunters of human flesh. They are warriors involved in the process of stalking, killing, and torturing their fellow humans as an expression of intergroup politics. The main expenditures and risks incurred in procuring and killing cannibal victims therefore cannot be charged to hunting; rather, it must be charged to warfare. The Tupinamba, Huron, or Iroquois did not go to war to obtain human flesh; they obtained human flesh as a by-product of going to war. Their consumption of the flesh of prisoners of war was therefore quite rational from a cost/benefit perspective. It was the nutritionally prudent alternative to letting a perfectly good source of animal food go to waste, and one for which there were no penalties, as in the Foré case. As an extra source of animal food, prisoners’ flesh must have been especially welcomed by those who normally received small shares in meat distribution, especially the women, who were often more “meat hungry” than their men. And this accounts for the prominent role played by the Tupinamba and Iroquois women in the rituals accompanying the cannibalistic feast.

Among the Iroquois and Huron, warfare “paid the bill” not only for capturing enemy men and women, but for bringing them home to the captors’ village in order to torture them. And torture itself had its own gruesome economy entirely separate from the costs of eating human flesh. Warlike societies such as the Iroquois and the Huron used torture to train their youth to be relentlessly aggressive toward the enemy. The prisoner’s living body was undoubtedly a more effective training device than modern-day sand-filled dummies and plastic targets. Torture purged the village youth of the last vestige of pity for the enemy and inured them to the sights and sounds of combat. And it not only prepared young men for their own pain in combat, but it warned them of a dreadful fate if their courage failed and they let themselves be captured by the enemy.

I cannot say very much about the numbers of prisoners whom the Iroquois and Huron brought back to their villages to be tortured and eaten. The Jesuit accounts give the impression that the number of such prisoners was not very large. Moreover, the Iroquois and Huron were not as stressed for animal food as the Tupinamba, since their temperate forest habitat was well endowed with large game species such as deer, moose, and bear. I find it difficult therefore to attach much nutritional significance to the practice of eating of prisoners brought back to the village. Even though the costs were minimal (after discounting the warrelated portion), the benefits were trivial. But the Iroquois and Huron did not confine their cannibalism to prisoners brought back to the village. They appear to have consumed a much larger quantity of human flesh while away from the village in the aftermath of the pitched battles which they fought with their enemies. These were occasions when the victims were stressed for food of any kind and when the bodies of the slain enemy represented a vital contribution to their combat rations. For example, after a battle fought against the French near Schenectady on 19 January 1693, Peter Schuyler, the mayor of Albany, reported that his Iroquois Indian allies “after their natural barbarity did cutt the enemy’s dead to pieces, roast them, and eat them.” This report was confirmed and elaborated by historian and governor of New York Cadwallader Colden who interviewed Schuyler about the incident. Colden wrote:

The Indians eat the bodies of the French that they found … Schuyler (as he told me himself) going among the Indians at that time, was invited to eat broth with them, which some of them had ready boiled, which he did, till they putting the ladle in the kettle to take out more, brought out a French man’s hand, which put an end to his appetite.

Since the Mohawk were allies of the English against the French, neither Colden nor Schuyler could have been interested in emphasizing the “savagery” of Iroquois customs.

The French for their part were no less open about their Huron allies’ use of human flesh as combat rations. The governor of New France, Jacques Devonville, reported that after a battle with the Seneca in 1687, the Huron ate the fallen enemy. “We witnessed the painful sight of the usual cruelties of the savages who cut the dead into quarters, as in slaughter houses, in order to put them in the pot; the greater number were opened while still warm, that their blood might be drank.”

Consumption of fallen enemy warriors to supplement combat rations seems to have been a common practice among village societies in many different parts of the world. The well-documented case of the Maori of New Zealand provides some important details. Maori war parties deliberately carried little food, living off the land wherever possible in order to increase their mobility and the element of surprise. On the march “they looked forward to the human source of supply and talked of how sweet the flesh of the enemy would taste.” The Maori cooked both the battlefield dead and most of their captives shortly after battle. If there was more flesh than they could consume, they deboned the meat and packed it in baskets for the return journey. Occasionally prisoners were kept alive so that they could carry these baskets and afterward serve as “slaves” until being killed and eaten in a cannibal feast. While I cannot supply any details concerning the overall contribution of human flesh to Maori subsistence, the nutritional significance of cannibalism on war expeditions cannot be denied. According to anthropologist Andrew Vayda, “Regardless of whether the Maoris believed that they were acquiring revenge, manna, aliment or pleasure through the process of digestion, the fact was that human flesh served for nutriment. This fact made cannibalism a useful practice in war.”

The incorporation of enemy bodies into the battlefield commisariat, while nutritionally practical, was not always militarily feasible. For a victorious military force to be able to make camp, collect the enemy’s bodies, light fires, and cook and eat a cannibal meal implies that the enemy has been so totally crushed that no counterattack is feasible. To consume their cannibal meals, the victors must feel secure against any possibility that the enemy will be able to regroup or summon up the assistance of allies and return to the fray. This kind of security implies in turn a scale of military operations that could not be managed by groups like the Tupinamba. Their military operations consisted of stealthy attacks against villages where everyone was asleep. The typical response of the victims was to run into the forest and, after a few moments of butchery, the engagement—more aptly described as a raid than a battle—was over. The victors at once turned around and headed for home because they feared that the dispersed enemy could regroup, summon allies, and return to the fray on more favorable terms.

The same military contingencies meant that the victors could only bring a small number of prisoners back home with them in order not to reduce the mobility of the raiding party. These military considerations also explain why many band and village societies only managed to bring back token pieces of the enemy—heads, scalps, fingers—rather than whole bodies or live prisoners. In other words, the practice of warfare recurrently led to a taste for human flesh on the battlefield, back home, or in both places, which was probably fulfilled wherever cannibalism was compatible with military strategy and military logistics.

If what I have just said is true, then one would expect that as the military capability for taking prisoners and eating them on the battlefield or bringing them back home increased, the intensity and scope of warfare cannibalism would also increase. As we will see in a moment, this prediction holds to a certain point in the development of societies which were chiefdoms. But with the rise of state forms of political organization, warfare cannibalism ceased to be practiced rather abruptly. From antiquity to modern times, virtually every society that has been organized as a state has condemned the consumption of human flesh more forcefully than it has condemned the consumption of any other kind of animal food. Yet states have a military capacity to capture and eat enemy soldiers that is ten thousand times greater than that of the Tupinamba or Iroquois. It is one of the great ironies of history that for the last five thousand years the people who fought the bloodiest battles with the most combatants and the highest levels of destruction—who fought wars so staggering in scope and ferocity as to be unimaginable to any poor cannibal—are to this day horrified by the thought of consuming the remains of even a single human being. (The one great exception was the Aztecs, a subject to be discussed ere long.)

I wish I could say that the reason cannibalism was rejected was because states and empires like Sumeria, Egypt, Han China, Rome, or Persia had “higher” religious and moral values than the Tupinamba, the Maori, the Iroquois, and other peoples who lacked central governments or standing armies. I wish I could say that Christians, Moslems, Jews, and Hindus became too “civilized” to eat each other. Unfortunately, it makes as little sense to offer this kind of explanation as to say that we have become too “civilized” to eat insects or horses. The great French essayist Michel de Montaigne long ago deflated the ethnocentric puffery of Westerners who would make cannibalism the ultimate measure of moral depravity. Upon learning about Tupinamba people eating from an acquaintance who had spent twelve years in Brazil, Montaigne emphatically rejected the notion that the Indians were on that account more savage than his own countrymen.

I am not so much concerned that we should remark on the horrible barbarity of such acts, as that, whilst rightly judging their errors, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a live than a dead man [this refers to a Frenchman who had cut off a piece of his enemy’s body and eaten it in public], in tearing on the rack and torturing the body of a man still full of feeling, in roasting him piecemeal and giving him to be bitten and mangled by dogs and swine (as we have not only read but seen with fresh memory, not between old enemies but between neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, under the cloak of piety and religion), than in roasting and eating him after he lies dead…. We may therefore call those people [the Tupinamba] barbarians in respect to the rules of reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.

To this it is my sad duty to add that nothing has changed in the four hundred years since Montaigne wrote his essay. Our socalled civilization has not deterred us from burning, blasting, and dismembering unprecedented numbers of fellow human beings as a means of resolving intergroup conflicts. If anything, when it comes to warfare, we have sunk lower than any of our predecessors: before the nuclear era, no two enemies ever planned to wage a war that would annihilate the whole world, friends, foes, and bystanders alike, in order to settle their own differences. And as for cruelty, according to Amnesty International, one-third of the countries of the world still use torture against enemies at home and abroad. No, I regret to have to say that human flesh became bad to eat for essentially the same reasons that the Brahmans stopped eating beef and Americans won’t eat dogs: the costs and benefits changed. More efficient sources of animal food became available, and the residual utility of prisoners of war increased, making them more valuable alive than dead. Let me explain how these changes came about.

There are three basic differences between states and bands or village-level societies: state societies have more productive economies enabling their farmers and workers to produce large surpluses of food and other goods; state societies have political systems which can place conquered territories and populations under a single government; and state societies also have a governing class whose political and military power depends on the flow of tribute and taxes from commoners and vassals. Since each farmer and worker in a state society can produce a surplus of goods and services, the larger a state’s population grows, the greater the amount of surplus production, the bigger the tax and tribute base, the more powerful the governing class becomes. In contrast, band and village societies are incapable of producing large surpluses. And band and village societies lack a military and political organization that is capable of uniting defeated enemies under a central government or a governing class that stands to benefit from taxation. For band and village societies the military strategy that most benefits the victors therefore is to kill or disperse the population of neighboring groups in order to lower the pressure of population on resources. Because of their low productivity, band and village societies cannot derive long-term benefits from capturing enemy personnel. Since captives cannot produce a surplus, bringing one home to serve as a slave simply means one more mouth to feed. Killing and eating captives is the predictable outcome; if captive labor cannot yield a surplus, captives are worth more as food than as producers of food. In contrast, for most state societies, killing and eating captives would thwart the governing class’s interest in expanding its tax and tribute base. Since captives can produce a surplus, far better to consume the products of their labor than the flesh of their bodies, especially if the meat and milk of domesticated animals (not available to most band and village people) is part of the surplus.

The abandonment of warfare cannibalism had additional payoffs for rulers who sought to create ever-larger imperial systems. They gained a great psychological advantage by assuring the enemy that surrender would not lead to being killed and eaten. Armies marching under the pretext of spreading higher “civilization” encounter less resistance than those marching under the banner of “we have come to kill and eat you.” In sum, a renunciation of warfare cannibalism was part of the general evolution of moral and ethical systems distinctive of imperialistic states, an evolution which ultimately led to the rise of universalistic religions emphasizing the unity of humankind and the worship of merciful gods who value love and kindness.

Let me anticipate a skeptical reaction. After battle many bodies would be strewn over the battlegrounds. Why prevent the victors from eating them? If the taboo against cannibalism were restricted only to the enemy who remained alive, could not the victorious soldiers obtain extra combat rations without jeopardizing the labor value of the living captives? A similar objection could be raised concerning the origin of the taboo on horseflesh. As we saw earlier, with the development of the taboo on horseflesh, even dead horses littering the battlefield were not good to eat. A similar solution seems appropriate for the two cases. The strongest taboo is one that admits of no exceptions. The greater the temptation to violate a taboo, the stronger it has to be. In order to protect live prisoners of war or live war-horses from being killed and eaten, human flesh or horseflesh must be equally taboo, alive or dead. I should also point out that the temptation to consume forbidden flesh could not have been as great among officers and aristocrats as among commoners. It was easier for the elites to renounce human flesh just as it was easier for them to renounce horseflesh. In the aftermath of battle, the captives were marched off to work for the benefit of the elites, not for the benefit of the commoners. And as always, officers and aristocrats enjoyed a privileged abundance of alternative animal foods. Meat-hungry commoners faced a less satisfactory prospect; they could neither enjoy an abundance of alternative animal foods, nor could they profit from the labor power of conquered peoples. Since they had nothing to gain from keeping former enemies alive, they had to be indoctrinated with powerful general sentiments against cannibalism in any form. They had to be taught a loathing for human flesh so strong that even the thought of eating battlefield dead (human or equine) would make them feel ill. Meat-hungry commoners might still creep into the fields and clandestinely eat the unthinkable; but the owners of living horses and living men could sleep more easily knowing that “civilized” people did not eat either men or horses, dead or alive.

Incidentally, one can see why the practice of eating the corpses of dead relatives also does not occur among state-level societies, even in token form. Any deviation from the ban on consuming human flesh would weaken the commitment of the state to the eradication of warfare cannibalism. States could not very well permit people to eat dead relatives, while preventing them from eating dead enemies. And so in the Old World it came to be understood of humans as it came to be understood of horses, be they alive or dead, friend or foe, they were not good to eat, no matter how good they might be to kill.

The theory I have been outlining predicts that the practice of warfare cannibalism should increase in scope and intensity with the development of chiefdoms and then rapidly wither away in the transition from chiefdom to state. Oceania provides a particularly interesting test. When first contacted by Europeans, the peoples of New Guinea, northern Australia, and most of the islands of Melanesia such as the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides, and New Caledonia practiced some degree of warfare cannibalism. Most of these groups were organized on a band or village basis; none had gone beyond the level of small-scale chiefdoms. The major exception was Fiji, where armies of powerful paramount chiefs fought pitched battles with each other for hegemony over a dense population without yet achieving a semblance of centralized government. And it is precisely on Fiji that warfare cannibalism reached a pitch of ferocity unmatched in the rest of Oceania. Early nineteenth-century eyewitness accounts indicate that prisoners captured outside a Fijian chiefdom or drawn from rebellious subjects within a chiefdom were sacrificed and eaten under the ritual supervision of priests at important events such as the dedication of a temple, the construction of a chief’s house, the launching of canoes, and the visits of allied chiefs. “All enemies killed in battle are, as a matter of course, eaten by the victors, the bodies being previously presented to the spirit.” The Fijians believed that human flesh was the food of the gods. They regarded the sacrifice and eating of human beings as a form of communion in which gods and mortals shared a meal (just as the Veda, Israelites, and Teutons sacrificed cattle and shared beef with the gods). In connection with wars waged in the early nineteenth century, Fijian “cannibalism was frequent and sometimes orgiastic.” One missionary estimated that “during a five-year period in the 1840’s, not fewer than 500 people had been eaten within fifteen miles of his residence.” The limits of the number of people who could be eaten after the sacking of large towns was probably near three hundred. One chief commemorated his cannibal repasts by setting out a stone for each victim. At the end of his life he had laid out 872 stones.

Although Fiji’s chiefdoms were bigger and better organized than most Melanesian political groupings, there were frequent periods of drought and nutritional stress. November through February was a season of hunger when the supply of yams and taro ran low. While the Fijians possessed domesticated pigs, they were unable to raise them in substantial numbers, and their diet was notably poor in animal foods. The fact that the Fijians ate their captives only after participating in elaborate rituals presided over by priests does not diminish the nutritional significance of the ingested flesh any more than the rituals practiced by the Aryans and Israelites during the sacrifice of cattle and the consumption of beef diminish the nutritional significance of beef. The consecration of captives to the major war god by chief or priest “freed the other bodies taken for more general consumption.” Yet it would be incorrect to say that the Fijians went to war in order to eat human flesh; rather, as in other cases of warfare cannibalism, having gone to war, they increased their material gains by eating as well as killing the enemy.

In contrast to the Melanesians, most of the peoples of Polynesia, another great island culture area of the Pacific, did not engage in warfare cannibalism. This accords well with the development in Polynesia of native political organizations based on rudimentary forms of taxation and labor conscription. In Hawaii, for example, villages were grouped into districts, and districts into island-wide kingdoms. District chiefs collected “gifts” of tapa cloth, fishing gear, and food from the villages and passed them on to the king. If a proper quantity of “gifts” were not forthcoming, the king’s warriors would plunder the uncooperative villages. The kings used their revenue to support personal retainers and warriors as well as craftsmen and workers who helped to enlarge the irrigation ditches and construct ponds for raising fish. When storms damaged these facilities, the king and his subchiefs distributed emergency food and supplies kept in their storehouses. With their highly productive irrigation agriculture, their fish ponds, and their deep-sea fishing canoes, the Hawaiians, like the Tongans and Tahitians, enjoyed a secure and abundant food supply that was relatively rich in animal products (including, of course, their poi-stuffed “pet” dogs).

To repeat, not all of the Polynesian islanders refrained from warfare cannibalism. The major exceptions were the Maori, the Marquesans, and possibly the Samoans. But these islands lacked the centralized political organization found on Tonga, Tahiti, and Hawaii. The political organization of the Maori resembled the fragmented chieftaincies of Melanasia, while the political organization of Marquesas islanders and the Samoans was no more centralized than that of Fiji. All three of the Polynesian groups that practiced warfare cannibalism also lacked the highly productive agriculture and fisheries which characterized the politically centralized Polynesian Islands. To sum up. In Oceania at least, the predicted relationship between warfare cannibalism and level of political organization seems to hold up: with the rise of centralized governments, prisoners of war became more valuable as taxpayers and peasants than as meat for a meal.

As I mentioned earlier, the Aztecs of Mexico are the one great exception to the rule that state societies everywhere suppress warfare cannibalism. Perhaps there are other exceptions, but if so, historians have never described them, and they have gone undetected by archaeologists. I fear that my explanation of why state societies kill people but do not eat them will remain unconvincing unless I can explain why the Aztecs continued to eat people as well as kill them. When contacted by Hernando Cortés’s expedition in 1519, the Aztecs had not only failed to repress the eating of enemy dead, they were practicing a state-sponsored form of human sacrifice and cannibalism on a scale never rivaled before or since. Estimates of the number of victims who were put to death and consumed each year range from a low of 15,000 to a high of 250,000. Most of them were enemy soldiers recently captured on the battlefield or temporarily in service as household slaves. The Aztecs also sacrificed and ate female captives and slaves. A small number of victims were children and infants expropriated from or donated by commoner families. As in prestate forms of warfare cannibalism, the Aztecs followed a highly ritualized procedure laden with symbolic significance in killing their victims and distributing their flesh. Like the Fijians they believed that human flesh was the food of the gods. But the Aztecs staged their sacrifice rituals against a backdrop of monumental plazas and temples and before daily throngs of spectators. Teams of butcher-priests dispatched the victims at the tops of the stepped pyramids which rose from the center of the Aztec’s capital, Tenochtitlán. In front of the stone statues of the principal gods, four of these priests seized the victim, each one pulling on a limb, and spreadeagled him or her backward over a low, rounded stone. A fifth priest then hacked open the wall of the chest, wrenched out the beating heart, and pressed it against the statue while the attendants pushed the victim’s body gently down the pyramid’s steps. When it reached the bottom other attendants severed the head and delivered the rest to the house compound of the “owner”—the captain or nobleman whose warriors had captured the deceased. On the following day, the body was cut up, cooked, and eaten at a feast attended by the owner and his guests, the favorite recipe being a stew flavored with peppers, tomatoes, and squash blossoms. Some doubt exists as to what happened to the trunk and its organs. According to one of the chronicles, the Aztecs threw the trunk to the animals in the royal zoo. But another chronicler refers to whole bodies minus only head and heart being delivered to the owner’s compound. All chroniclers agree that the head was usually pierced by a wooden shaft and placed on display on a latticework structure or “skull rack” alongside the heads of previous victims. The largest of these skull racks was located in the main plaza of Tenochtitlán. One eyewitness counted the number of poles and shafts and concluded that it contained 136,000 skulls. A modern skeptic has recalculated this total based on the maximum height of the trees available to the Aztecs and the average width of a skull and come to the conclusion that the skull rack in question actually could have contained no more than 60,000 skulls.

But this was not the only skull rack in the Aztec capital. In the same plaza there were five additional, if smaller, racks, and there were also two tall towers made of an uncountable number of skulls and jaws held together by lime. These skulls did not accumulate at a steady pace. Although there were regular feast days throughout the year at which as many as 100 prisoners were sacrificed at a time, the priests killed much larger numbers at intervals to commemorate major historical events such as military victories, the coronation of a new king, or the building or enlargement of pyramids or temples. For example, the Aztecs enlarged and rededicated the main pyramid in Tenochtitlán at least six times. Native accounts state that the priests sacrificed 80,400 prisoners in four days and nights at the rededication which took place in 1487—the last before the Spanish conquest. By allotting two minutes per sacrifice, historian and demographer Sherburne Cook concluded that no more than 14, 000 prisoners could have been dispatched. But Francis Robicsek, a cardiovascular surgeon familiar with the history of pre-Columbian Mexico, holds that an experienced surgeon would have needed only twenty seconds per victim. That would put the killing capacity of the highly experienced surgical teams at the tops of the pyramids back up to 78, 000. An important point is whether the prisoners cooperated or not. A majority of Aztec scholars follow the lead of Mexico’s tourist agency and try to cover up the monstrous nature of Aztec religion by claiming that the prisoners were eager to submit to the knife because they believed it was an honor to be eaten by the gods. This propensity to sentimentalize cruelty in the name of cultural relativism is totally at variance with the reported facts. The most important historical document concerning the Aztecs, Bernadino de Sahagun’s Florentine Codex, states that the masters of captive slaves “pulled them and dragged them by the hair to the sacrificial stone where they were to die.” And in Motolinia’s sixteenth-century History of the Indians of New Spain, we find the following warning:

Let no one think that any of those who were sacrificed by being slain and having their hearts torn out or being killed in any other way, suffered death voluntarily and not by force. They had to submit to it, feeling great grief over their death and enduring frightful pain.

Against attempts to downscale the number of cannibal victims, I would point out that contingents of Aztec priests accompanied the Aztec armies into combat and performed sacrificial rituals immediately after a battle was won. There is also some evidence that under duress, the Aztecs may have eaten bodies left on the battlefield. Taking into consideration the possibility that sacrificial victims such as those dedicated to the rain god may not always have been eaten, and allowing for the tendency of both the Spaniards and the Aztecs to exaggerate the number of victims available for cannibal feasts, we are still left with the fact that the Aztecs practiced warfare cannibalism on an unprecedented scale. No one can deny that the Aztec state and Aztec religion encouraged rather than banned its practice.

How can one explain the unique failure of the Aztec state to repress warfare cannibalism? I think the same costs and benefits apply to this exception as to the rule. As in other state societies, the Aztec elite had to strike a balance between the nutritional benefits provided by human flesh and the political and economic costs of destroying the wealth-producing potential of human labor power. The Aztecs chose to eat the human equivalent of the golden goose. The reason they made this unique choice was that their system of food production was uniquely devoid of efficient sources of animal foods. The Aztec had never succeeded in domesticating a single large herbivore or omnivore. They possessed neither ruminants nor swine. Their principal domestic animals were the turkey and the dog. Turkeys are good converters of grain to flesh; but they can be used on a large scale for meat production only when a human population can afford the 90 percent energy loss incurred by eating the meat instead of the grain. Similarly, the dog is scarcely the kind of creature one would want to mass-produce as an animal food. Dogs themselves thrive best on meat. Why feed meat to a dog to get meat for people? Although the Aztecs did try to develop breeds of dogs that put on weight from eating cooked corn and beans, they would have been better off sticking to turkeys, which can at least eat uncooked plant food. In no way could either dogs or turkeys have furnished more than a token quantity of meat per capita even if they were eaten only by the Aztec elites.

Perhaps I need to emphasize at this point that the overall degree of poverty and hunger was not the crucial difference between the Aztec subsistence system and the subsistence systems of state societies which successfully repressed cannibalism. The peasants of India and China probably lived no better than the Aztec peasants. The pinch did not occur on the mass level but on the level of the military and religious elites and their followers. By repressing warfare cannibalism, Old World elites obtained significant improvements in their wealth and power. By preserving the lives of their captives, they could intensify the production of luxury goods and animal foods for their personal consumption and for redistribution to their followers. Perhaps the commoners also benefited to some extent, but that was not crucial. Among the Aztec, the practice of warfare cannibalism probably did little to improve the condition of the peasantry. It continued because it continued to benefit the elites; repressing it would have diminished rather increased their wealth and power.

The link between the Aztecs’ unique failure to repress cannibalism and their lack of domesticated herbivores was formulated by anthropologist Michael Harner in 1977. The storm of denunciation which greeted Harner’s modest proposal is to me far more remarkable than the Aztec’s taste for human flesh. No one has come forth to deny that the Aztecs waged incessant warfare far and wide throughout central Mexico; nor has anyone sought to protect the Aztecs from being depicted as the world’s number one practitioners of human sacrifice. Most scholars even accept the fact that the Aztecs were great cannibals. But what has driven normally mild-mannered scholars into a frenzy is the proposal that the Aztecs went to war, built pyramids, and sacrificed thousands of prisoners, as one critic put it, “as a way the Aztecs had for getting some meat.” This immodest proposal is entirely a product of prejudice and misinformation and has nothing whatsoever to do with the nutritional explanation of Aztec warfare cannibalism that I have just presented. It embodies a view that is directly contrary to the cost/benefit approach that I have been following—since it charges the full cost of warfare, the building of the pyramids, and the sacrifice of prisoners to the production of human flesh, whereas everything that I have said about why warfare cannibalism occurs at all is premised on the assumption that warfare cannibalism is a by-product of warfare and that its costs can be written off almost entirely as costs of war which would have been incurred whether or not the combatants ate each other.

Proceeding on their entirely different and quite erroneous assumptions, critics of the theory that Aztec cannibalism reflects a peculiar nutritional situation have attempted to show that the Aztecs suffered from no dearth of good, wholesome, proteinaceous and calorific foods. Anthropologist Ortiz de Montellano, for example, has diligently collected information on the extraordinary variety of foods consumed by the Aztecs in order to prove that meat hunger could not have motivated their cannibalism. It is indeed true that in addition to their staples—corn, beans, chia, and amaranth—the Aztec ate a wide variety of tropical fruits and vetetables. And although turkeys and dogs were their only domesticated sources of animal food, it is also true that they hunted and ate a broad spectrum of wild animal species. As enumerated by Montellano, these include deer, armadillo, thirty varieties of waterfowl, pocket gophers, weasels, rattlesnakes, mice, fish, frogs, salamanders, fish eggs, water flies, corixid beetles, beetle eggs, dragonfly larvae, grasshoppers, ants, and worms. Another expert on Aztec food habits adds quail, partridge, pheasant, tadpoles, molluscs, rabbits, hares, opossum boars, tapirs, crustacea, and tecuitutl, a “green lake scum” formed by waterfly eggs from which “the people made a bread which was cheese-like in flavor.” The breadth of this diet is truly remarkable, but it leads to a conclusion entirely contrary to what Montellano intends to prove. Montellano is correct: “the Aztecs consumed a greater variety of foods than we do.” But so did the meat-hungry warfare cannibals of Amazonia. If the Aztecs ate everything from deer to water beetle eggs and green lake scum, why should anyone be surprised that they also ate people? Once again let me refer to the basic principles of optimal foraging theory: “small things”—insects and worms and fly larvae—are highly inefficient resources. Their prominence in the Aztec’s diet cannot be used as evidence that the Aztecs enjoyed an abundance of animal food. On the contrary, what the breadth of their diet shows is that higher-ranking species such as deer and tapir were in extremely short supply. Because of the exorbitant amount of time needed to collect and process the Aztec’s lower-ranking forageable species, and because of the energetic inefficiency of their domesticated animals, animal foods could only have made up a small fraction of the Aztec diet. Despite the impression that animal foods were abundant, when shared on an annual per capita basis among the million or so people who lived within a twenty-mile radius of the Aztec capital, the daily intake of meat, fish, and fowl was almost certainly no greater than a few grams per day. In view of the absence of efficient alternative sources of animal food, any attempt to prevent military commanders from using human flesh as a means of rewarding their followers would have met a far greater degree of resistance in the Aztec case than was true of the generality of Old World states and empires, every one of which possessed several domesticated ruminant species.

At the same time that the lack of efficient alternative sources of animal food raised the value of the enemy as “meat on the hoof,” it lowered the value of the enemy as serf, slave, and taxpayer. It did this in two ways. First, the absence of domesticated ruminants and swine meant that even if the conquered populations were preserved instead of eaten, there was no way their labor power could be harnessed to the task of improving the supply of animal food. With the population of wild species already depleted by too much hunting and collecting, additional labor devoted to foraging would have brought meager returns. Secondly, the absence of large domesticated herbivores which could serve as beasts of burden diminished the value of the enemy as producers of plant food. Lacking cattle or horses, the Aztecs were obliged to rely on human porters to transport the harvest of tributary provinces to their capital. Human porters have the distinct disadvantage of needing to be fed a large portion of the crops they transport in order to be able to carry their burdens. As compared with cattle and equines, which can subsist on humanly inedible plants, human beasts of burden are a costly mode of moving a grain harvest from one region to another. One can see therefore why the Aztecs’ captives were worth more to them dead as meat than alive as serfs and slaves. The Aztecs were unusually ill supplied with meat and other animal products; and the tribute populations were unusually unrewarding as a source of subservient labor: they could not relieve the Aztecs’ meat hunger; and they themselves ate up much of the grain surplus while carrying it to their masters. The Aztec solution was grim but cost-efficient: they treated their captives the same way Midwestern cornbelt farmers treated their hogs. They walked the grain harvest to Tenochtitlán on the hoof.

Because they ate as well as taxed a considerable proportion of their able-bodied population, the Aztecs never succeeded in establishing a stable system of imperial rule. As soon as a province had restored its manpower, it tried to rebel against the oppressors. The Aztecs then returned and laid the basis for the next rebellion by marching a new crop of prisoners back to Tenochtitlán.

I hope I have made it clear that I do not believe that cannibalism among the Aztecs was impelled by a “protein shortage” or that Aztec “cannibalism arose out of necessity” or that Aztec cannibalism was “a response to dietary insufficiency” or that “protein starvation” among the Aztec was an “impelling force to Cannibalism” (all of these upside-down notions appeared in a single article by Ortiz de Montellano). Rather, my point is that the practice of warfare cannibalism was a normal by-product of prestate warfare and that the question that has to be answered is not what impelled state societies to practice it but what impelled them not to practice it. The scarcity of animal food among the Aztecs did not compel them to eat human flesh; it simply made the political advantages of suppressing cannibalism less compelling by leaving the residual utility of prisoners of war more or less where it had been among societies like the Tupinamba and the Iroquois.

I suspect that the reason so many scholars turn this relationship on its head is that they themselves are members of state societies that have suppressed warfare cannibalism for thousands of years, and therefore find the notion of people eating abhorrent. This leads them to assume ethnocentrically that there must be some great compelling reason for people to do such a horrible thing as to eat human flesh. They fail to see that the real conundrum is why we who live in a society which is constantly perfecting the art of mass-producing human bodies on the battlefield find humans good to kill but bad to eat.

Imagining that his task was to prove that the Aztecs did not go to war “to get some meat,” Ortiz de Montellano also studied the relationship between the seasonal occurrence of food shortages and the months when the greatest numbers of prisoners were sacrificed. He discovered that the hungriest time of the year was the time of the year when the fewest prisoners were eaten. Since “the biggest consumption of human meat took place … in the middle of the corn harvest,” he concluded that the whole sacrificial complex had nothing to do with meat hunger but was merely “an expression of gratitude and communion,” a gesture of “thanks and reciprocity to the gods.” But the overlap between the season of sacrifice and the season of harvest is exactly what one would expect if the Aztecs did not go to war to eat prisoners but ate prisoners as a by-product of going to war. The hungry season is the time of winter rains in the basin of Mexico; the harvest season is the dry season. Armies, even modern armies, avoid rainy-season campaigns; not only is it easier to get around when the ground is dry, but the ripening crops in the enemy’s fields make it possible to live off the land. The crops also provide tempting spoils of war to be transported home on the heads and backs of prisoners. Montellano’s “gesture of thanks and reciprocity” still stands, but it in no way contradicts the nutritional significance of the rituals. Who would not thank the gods for the gift of corn and meat? All state-level religions render such thanks at harvest time. The only thing different about the Aztecs is that the meat was human meat. Saying it was part of their religion to eat human meat gets us nowhere. It is like saying that Hindus abhor beef because their religion forbids cow slaughter or that Americans don’t eat goats because goats don’t taste good. I shall never be satisfied with that kind of explanation.

Harris, Marvin. Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture. Waveland Press, 07/1998.

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