Buzzard Men, Our Flesh as Food, Circle of Life, and So On

Buzzard Men, Our Flesh as Food, Circle of Life, and So On



In the central chamber of Egypt’s Kom Ombo, a temple complex along the Nile, there’s a ceiling mural featuring a line of vultures, wearing pharaonic headgear, avian royalty.

By contrast, vultures are disdained by many moderns. Urban Dictionary defines buzzard as “a contemptible white trash plastic Graphix bong smoker… feathered hair, tight stone washed jeans with oil stained white T's.”

Despite such disdain, the buzzard bird is an essential player in the circle of life for cultures that invite these carnivorous creatures to clean the bones of the dead prior to burial or re-burial. After living at the top of the food chain, it somehow seems correct for us to be, in turn, consumed.

At San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum, I saw many ossuaries (boxes for bones) retrieved from parts of the Levant, many just north of the Sea of Galilee. A number of these clay containers feature humanoid forms with hooked noses that suggest a vulture’s beak.



Most interesting to me were the vulture figures on a small-scale representation of an ancient enclosure, which I interpret to be a mortuary chamber.



“Sky burials” are still practiced in parts of Tibet, and vultures were once a sanctioned participant in the funeral practices of Native Americans.

Cahokia, just outside St. Louis, is one of the greatest remaining monuments of Mississippian culture. Many of the artifacts contained the mounds have been, like those in St. Louis, bulldozed to oblivion. There are, however, a few precious remaining pieces of this ancient civilization, among them the so-called “Bird Man Tablet,” a humanoid figure with a hooked nose and wings. Many interpret the bird to be a hawk, but I believe the outstretched wings indicate that this is a vulture (vultures sit and spread their wings to maximize surface area and absorb more heat; hawks do not).

In Pre-Contact settlements throughout this part of the world, itinerant groups of so-called buzzard men would travel from city to city, doing the jobs of buzzards: cleaning the bones in preparation for burial.

Allowing the beasts of the natural world to feed on the flesh of our dead is likely a repugnant thought to many. Me, I think it’s repugnant to pump the dead full of toxic chemicals and then bury them in the sacred earth. Cremation is a more feasible option, but even burning the dead seems a waste of resources and a source of air pollution.

Sky burials, on the other hand, where the bodies are left to be consumed by the creatures of the air, seems an ecologically sound approach to managing the ever increasing number of dead on earth.

Of course, it’d be challenging to practice sky burials on a mass scale. You’d almost need a single location, some desolate are that would permit the exposure of many deceased humans to the birds, who would feast upon flesh and thus return us all to the earth from which we came. I nominate Detroit. People keep talking about the rebirth of the Motor City, and becoming America’s Only Sky Burial Zone could help this rust belt ruin resurrect itself as the most fertile agricultural regions in the world.

I myself would definitely consider a sky burial, if it were available…or perhaps even a burial at sea, which would also encourage the recycling of this mortal coil by hungry beasts. Call me Fish-meal.

PS. If you, too, are fascinated by both food and mortuary practices, check out the In Remembrance of Me exhibit at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. It goes only until January 4…and this coming Saturday, TOMORROW, Cathy2 and the Chicago Culinary Historians are touring the exhibit; it starts at 10:15 am. See you there.

David Hammond wrote:Cahokia, just outside St. Louis, is one of the greatest remaining monuments of Mississippian culture. Many of the artifacts contained the mounds have been, like those in St. Louis, bulldozed to oblivion. There are, however, a few precious remaining pieces of this ancient civilization, among them the so-called “Bird Man Tablet,” a humanoid figure with a hooked nose and wings. Many interpret the bird to be a hawk, but I believe the outstretched wings indicate that this is a vulture (vultures sit and spread their wings to maximize surface area and absorb more heat; hawks do not).

The Oriental Institute exhibit is wonderful; glad to hear of the CCH tour.

Having worked at Cahokia and related chert procurement sites, I respectfully disagree with your vulture hypothesis. While the tablet (found at a perimeter trench at Monk's Mound) is not directly associated with the Mound 72 burial, both that burial (containing falcon bones and the famous falcon outline in amazing imported marine shell beads), and other Mississippian tablets including those from Illinois, suggest the priestly and mortuary association depicted was with the falcon. While there is both loss and an intentional partial depiction on the MM tablet, others show the distinctive falcon / hawk lower plumage banding that is not present in Cathartes aura.

David Hammond wrote:PS. If you, too, are fascinated by both food and mortuary practices, check out the In Remembrance of Me exhibit at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute []. It goes only until January 4…and this coming Saturday, TOMORROW, Cathy2 and the Chicago Culinary Historians are touring the exhibit; it starts at 10:30am. See you there.

Museum opens at 10:00 am, we will meet at 10:15 am.

I thought I would be going alone, now I have about 20 people. The more the merrier, if you wish to join us.

Regards,

Santander wrote:Having worked at Cahokia and related chert procurement sites, I respectfully disagree with your vulture hypothesis. While the tablet (found at a perimeter trench at Monk's Mound) is not directly associated with the Mound 72 burial, both that burial (containing falcon bones and the famous falcon outline in amazing imported marine shell beads), and other Mississippian tablets including those from Illinois, suggest the priestly and mortuary association depicted was with the falcon. While there is both loss and an intentional partial depiction on the MM tablet, others show the distinctive falcon / hawk lower plumage banding that is not present in Cathartes aura.

Falcons are also carrion birds, and so would function in a mortuary capacity pretty much the same as vultures (though I think with vultures, carrion is probably a bigger part of their diets).

Would love to hear about work you did at Cahokia.

David Hammond wrote:

Santander wrote:Having worked at Cahokia and related chert procurement sites, I respectfully disagree with your vulture hypothesis. While the tablet (found at a perimeter trench at Monk's Mound) is not directly associated with the Mound 72 burial, both that burial (containing falcon bones and the famous falcon outline in amazing imported marine shell beads), and other Mississippian tablets including those from Illinois, suggest the priestly and mortuary association depicted was with the falcon. While there is both loss and an intentional partial depiction on the MM tablet, others show the distinctive falcon / hawk lower plumage banding that is not present in Cathartes aura.

Falcons are also carrion birds, and so would function in a mortuary capacity pretty much the same as vultures (though I think with vultures, carrion is probably a bigger part of their diets).

Would love to hear about work you did at Cahokia.

If there were carillon tours on Saturdays at Rockefeller Chapel, I'd take you up the tower when you're on the block later today to see this year's peregrine pair, which are live-bird hunters. If they eat carrion it's a rarity and their own prior kill, though I concede diet does vary over the range of the species. Sometimes they get a Hyde Park Parakeet and I have green feather fluff stuck to my shoes after the climb.



Hit me up another time for a tour (invite open to all LTHers, PM me), or when you're at OI, just bring a pair of binoculars and be patient looking up.

That they are the fastest creatures anywhere, using the sun as a visual reference point (they can pick it up through cloud cover), was and is not lost on Native American cultures.

Vultures did certainly factor in Hopewell (pre-Mississippian) and Cahokia-era ceremonial imagery, including ritual (possibly practical, for elite) food preparation vessels, to keep things germane. Here's a great example in the National Museum of the American Indian: http://www.americanindian.si.edu/search ... irn=182089.

However, in the late Woodland and Mississippian, falcon imagery predominated in the "birdman" / winged warrior "cult," which in the Southeast actually used to be called the Buzzard Cult before concordances between excavated sites, so I can see where you're coming from. There is a preponderance of evidence from faunal remains and clearly-identifiable feather patterns and body shape in objects from other mound complexes over a wide geographical area - Etowah, Reed, Spiro, etc. to suggest it was the falcons that were being modeled and melded in the dances and ritual poses depicted artistically at this time, whether we're seeing zoomorphism or therianthropy.

Here's a problematic but well-illustrated article on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeaste ... al_Complex. [I disagree that the Red Horn mythic cycle stems from the culture or languages of Cahokia, and separately actually do think there was a viable connection between SECC (and broader MIIS) and Mesoamerica.]

My practical archaeological training was at procurement sites related to Cahokia, before I started to focus on contemporaneous medieval ritual architecture across the pond (and music therein, hence Rockefeller). Everything is more connected than it seems. Pre-Columbian and very early colonial archaeology remains my summer project and midnight reading. Oh, look, Big Guys has the Rudolph sausage again (/food).

That peregrine looks to be giving you the stink eye. When I lived in Lincoln Park (well, not in the park, but across the street) we had a pair living on our building. The pigeons gave our house a wide berth, which was fine with me.

Fascinating information, Santander! I can't help wondering what you think about what type of bird the original Cahokia-era Piasa Bird was intended to be.

The Wikipedia article starts out by calling it a "native American dragon" (?) but goes on to say that "Icons and animal pictographs, such as falcons, thunder-birds, bird men, and monstrous snakes were common motifs of the Cahokia culture. The Piasa creature may have been painted as a graphic symbol to warn strangers traveling down the Mississippi River that they were entering Cahokian territory."

Some 90 years ago, my grandfather carved a Piasa Bird on a toy chest for my dad and his brother. I suppose anyone from around there can do a quick drawing of a Piasa Bird, and I don't suppose it matters if it was originally any particular type of bird, but it's interesting to learn that it might have been modeled on a falcon.

An interesting idea, something I've thought about a lot. When I die, my body basically turns into an inert bag of nutrients which rapidly degrades in usefulness. I would have no further attachment to or use for it. What a waste of money and biomass to bury it in a box where it does no good. If there were some way to efficiently and safely convert corpses into fertilizer for crops I would be the first to sign up for the process. Like when you get your driver's license: check for organ donor, check for cadaver fertilizer conversion.

I first learned about sky burial while traveling in Tibet. I encountered it a second time in Mongolia, because most Mongols are Tibetan Buddhists. A particularly lovely valley in Mongolia's Gobi is known as "Vulture's Mouth," which, given the practice of sky burial, I take to be roughly the equivalent of "heaven's gate."

Tibet also has water burial, where you let the fish pick the bones. Considered less prestigious than sky burial, it is useful in areas where there aren't vultures.