Ancient Mesoamerican Recipe For Cooking Human Flesh Decoded By Archaeologists

I ate his liver with fava beans and a nice chianti. -- Hannibal Lecter

The most famous cannibal in modern cinema delivered a line that became iconic precisely because it evokes in the audience both hunger and disgust. Humans eat food to sate a biological need; we eat to cement social relationships; we eat for emotional, ritual, and celebratory reasons. But often, humans eat other humans for the same reasons.

At the Mesoamerican site of Tlatelcomila not far from Mexico City, human bones dating to the Late Preclassic Period, 700-500 BC, show evidence of cannibalism. The fragmentary remains of 18 men, women, and children have clear signs that their flesh was cut off and their bones were broken around the time of their deaths. What archaeologists wanted to know, though, was exactly how the meat was prepared.  Was it grilled or boiled?  What seasonings were used?

In an article just published in the journal Archaeometry, researchers Aioze Trujillo-Mederos, Pedro Bosch , Carmen Pijoan, and Josefina Mansilla used a suite of chemical and physical techniques to answer these questions. Specifically, many of the bones had a yellow or red tinge to them and the archaeologists wanted to know "whether the Tlatelcomila bones were treated at a low temperature, if they were intentionally coloured, or if the colour results from a particular cooking procedure." Using powder x-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy, and ultraviolet visible spectroscopy, they took a close look at samples of the human bones.

Based on the results of the chemical analysis, Trujillo-Mederos and colleagues showed not only that all of the bones were cooked, but also that some were grilled while some were boiled. "Both boiling and grilling were used in Mesoamerican ritual anthropophagy [or cannibalism]," the authors write, so finding both forms of cooking in the same assemblage of bone was not too surprising.

The color of the bones is still not explained by simple grilling over an open flame or cooking in water.  In some cases, a post-death ritual of rubbing bones with cinnabar creates red or yellow staining on bone. But this analysis showed that the color on the bones happened around the time of death. In the case of the grilled bones, the researchers suggest that "the meat juices concentrate around the bone and diffuse into it slightly," meaning "blood coming from the meat as temperatures increased" caused the red patches.  The boiled bones, though, are different shades of yellow, suggesting they were cooked at low heat with colorful ingredients like annatto, pipián, or chilis. These spices are full of carotenoids, which can dye food, clothing, and even hair and bone. The authors conclude that "the differences in colour have to be attributed to the cooking recipes used in Mesoamerica."

Humans eating humans is not a new practice and is not isolated to a single location or time period.  Trujillo-Mederos and colleagues' brilliant study, though, is novel in re-creating the ingredients and cooking method from tiny fragments of ancient human remains.

Trujillo-Mederos and colleagues' full article, "Savoury recipes and the colour of the Tlatelcomila human bones," can be found in early view at the journal Archaeometry.