"Except for fish, man was the most popular of the vertebrate animals used for food." So opined archaeologist E. W. Gifford of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951 after finding pieces of human bone intermixed with animal remains at ancient sites in the Fiji Islands. Early 20th-century accounts from the South Pacific inspired many a cartoon of grass-skirted natives dancing around pots of missionaries being boiled--but modern archaeologists have felt that definitive proof of cannibalism was lacking.
Now, almost 50 years later, Berkeley grad student David DeGusta says he's got the goods. In what he calls "the first well-documented instance of cannibalism in Oceania," DeGusta analyzed the bones Gifford had collected from a midden, or refuse heap, on the island of Viti Levu that spanned 2000 years, as well as bones from a nearby human burial site of the same vintage. DeGusta concluded from close examination of bone marks that the patterns of breaks, burns, and cut marks matched those found on the bones of various animals in the midden. By contrast, bones from the burial site "are essentially unmodified," he reports in the October issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
DeGusta has done a "nice piece of work. ... [His] evidence looks very convincing," says Christy Turner, an archaeologist at Arizona State University in Tempe who claims there is evidence for cannibalism among ancient inhabitants of the U.S. Southwest.
