The Bloody Truth Behind America's Ancient Anasazi | Native American Documentary | Timeline

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I’m Aztec and in the end this documentary completely blamed all the horrors and cannibalism on my people. I’m also not at all offended. If there is clear proof that Aztec peoples moved to the area and did this, then it is what it is. This was 800 years ago! Political correctness has no place in history!

If you're a scientist and you reject facts because they're offensive, you're not a scientist.

This confirms the stories of the Diné (Navaho) historian Wally Brown about the Anasazi. The Diné name for the Chaco Canyon ruins is "Place of Weeping and Wailing".

In the end, they say a cult of displaced Aztecs ate the local Anasazi in the American southwest. But current elders in the Navajo nation say that the Anasazi were the Aztecs. While the victims were Navajo and Pueblo.

He doesn’t need to be sensitive to anything he needs to tell the truth, actual science has no sensitivities, only findings.

As part Native, please don't let the truth die. It is the past regardless of how vile we see it today. The actions of the past should not be judged by today's standards.

I agree completely with Louis L'Amour "A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time".

Louis L'Amour

Wally Brown, Navajo historian, has a lot to say about this topic. According to Dineh (Navajo) oral history, the Anasazi left no descendants. Instead, they were eradicated by the ancestors of the cliff dwelling tribes and the puebloan tribes, whom they had enslaved and victimized (cannabalized?) for three centuries. Brown says the puebloans and cliff dwellers were present when the Dineh migrated into the Southwest. The Anasazi came later from the south. They were violent and oppressive, practiced human sacrifice and possibly cannibalism. These practices horrified the original inhabitants. Eventually, the victimized tribes turned on the Anasazi and wiped them out. Brown’s oral history is fascinating and presents a completely new way of viewing the history of the region. According to the Dineh, modern puebloan tribes are not descended from the cannibal Anasazi, but from the heroic survivors of their victims. Worth a listen:

https://youtu.be/JIKLnZoOtR4

As a Navajo myself who grew up on the reservation I remember stories of the Anasazi, I was told that they were part of a certain people who came up from south america who set up these places as mass trading sites. There are stories of them taking our navajo people as slaves and it was a drought that caused their trade network to fail causing their ultimate downfall...perhaps thats what drove them to cannibalism toward their end...

Cannibalism was common for many different cultures. My people (Polynesians) were Cannibals until only about 170 years ago. Specifically in Tonga where my parents are from. Love and respect to my native brothers and sisters. 💯✊🏾

Your Tongan friend from Provo Utah

I am navajo, and I was told old stories that Anasazis were cannibals, and that I am surprised that a scientist found out by looking at the bones, crazy!

Another aspect to this theory- is the presence of the hundreds of cliff dwellings that were built in this timeline. Many are clearly defensive postions - many in locations that were extremely difficult to access or attack. Was this a reaction by a more peaceful people to the theorized more violent newcomers?

“He’s so removed from it” because he is being objective. You have to be objective to be scientific.

My grandmother was a native woman. She died at over 105 years of age and she told my siblings and I about old rituals that our ancestors committed.....and yes cannibalism was a part of that. Why that one guy is so sensative about that subject.....riddles me. Maybe he has never spoken honestly to one of his elders, or asked the proper questions to his elders. Maybe he didn't pay attention to his elders teachings.

A Navajo elder, who has a channel here on, YouTube, says the stories that were handed down through the generations by his ancestors were that the Anasazi came from the south, and discovered the pueblos and the Cliff dwellers (whom he called something like Dine) already there in Chaco Canyon. The Pueblo and Cliff Dwellers were peaceful when the Anasazi arrived. He says the Anasazi were very warlike and they enslaved the Pueblo people, but claims they only ruled for about 300 years and then destroyed themselves by mocking the Gods and all their slaves left and they couldn’t survive.
I do not discount these tribal stories in any culture. They may add a little magic in the telling but it seems they are basically always true.

When I was young, back in the early 70's I got a chance to go to Mesa Verde...and I was astounded at the cliff dwellings and became entranced with the beauty of the place and the mystery of the Anasazi. As I got older though, I felt something was off with the history and the narrative of what happened in the southwest...so, I started travelling and going to many Southwestern sites and reading everything I could about the ancestral Puebloans...When I was young, the story was that these were egalitarian, peaceful simple farmers....but when you walk through the ruins of Chaco, Aztec Ruins, Salmon Ruins and many others...you get a very, very different feeling...This was a complex, thriving Mesoamerican society with what I believe were "Kings" and they had wars, Religion, Culture, basically all the things a thriving, sophisticated, culture would have. Finally over the last 2 decades the narrative is starting to change and putting the Anasazi, Hohokam and Fremont peoples into their proper perspective. I recommend anyone who is even slightly interested in Southwestern ancient history to read Stephen Lekson's Book "A History of the Ancient Southwest" an amazing and eye opening book that tries to put the pieces of the puzzle together and show what was really going on around a thousand years ago in the Southwest.

I Am Native American and extreme environments and extreme weather and extreme conditions and circumstances come together it is not at all impossible to see what happened! Just think of the plane crash in the mountains and what those people did with the dead to stay alive!

I never thought I'd watch an Archaeologists carving raw meat with rocks in his driveway

When we were kids , grandma and grandpa told us not to walk on the broken pottery ( kitsiilii) or shattered pottery. Also we shouldn't be walking on the anasazi ruins for it was a place of a grave. Before I took the sheep out to graze. Grandma used to tell me " you better watch out for the little people, they come out of the woods. If you don't keep alert they will get you" . These anasazi were mayans. The cliff dwelling ruins were built by the ones hiding from the mayans. Not just Pueblos , there were the navajos, the Zuni, the uses, and the apaches. They all pitched in to build the cliff dwellings.