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Comment by JoeDaDude | Hacker News Reader

There is a debate that so called Anasazi people of the American southwest either ritually burned and abandoned their Kivas (ceremonial building) or that the burning is evidence of warfare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiva

https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/hh/36/hh36c-2.h...

https://spot.colorado.edu/~laursen/southwest/chaco/chacoMain...

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The correct term today is ancestral puebloan. Anasazi basically means "ancestral/ancient enemies" in Navajo.

Anyway, that debate (to the extent it existed as a general thing) has been resolved. It's both. Violence, including burnings, is archaeologically well attested at numerous sites. Likewise, ritual destruction is both archeologically and culturally well-supported. There's debate about many particular sites, but even many of the smaller debates like man-corn aren't subjects of serious disagreement anymore.

Those Kivas are really interesting. We visited one of the sites in New Mexico at Bandolier National Monument. Very cool how they carved all the houses into the cliffs.

Most interesting fact that stuck with me was they ground all their grains using rocks that were too soft, so bits of rock would get in all their food, quickly removing all the enamel from their teeth and rotting them away. I can’t imagine how painful that must have been. Surviving meant the children had to chew all the food for the adults and spit it out for them to eat.

If you enjoyed those cliff houses, you might like Cappadocia in Turkey which has a lot of similar dwellings, and even an underground town of sorts. A few of the areas you can explore more freely than at Bandolier.

https://www.google.com/search?q=cappadocia&safe=off&source=l...

There are also massive temples cut from rock.

E.g., from a quick search:

- Kailasa temple https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-asia/kailasa-... and http://www.indiagk.net/2014/06/kailash-temple-ellora-cave-te...

- https://www.easemytrip.com/blog/rock-cut-temples-and-archite...

- Masroor temples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masrur_Temples

- https://photoscaping.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/celestial-rock...

My favorite is Petra city that has multiple large buildings carved right in the face of rock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra

That's true, but what connects Bandolier and Cappadocia are that they are carved out of a softer material which was created as a thick layer of volcanic ash. Visiting both, you notice similarities.

More for your list, that I visited back in the 1990s, are the Yungang Grottoes in Northern China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungang_Grottoes

NZ Māori in the South Island, who relied more on aruhe[1] - the rhizome of the bracken fern - than the North Island population, also showed higher rates of dental wear from the fibrous rhizome. Ditto populations with a diet rich in shellfish - they often contain remnants of sand.

(The N.I. Māori could grow kumara (sweet potato), but the growing area of kumara in South Island was limited to the east coast from Banks Peninsula northwards).

[1]: https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/20258/aruhe

I don't remember if it was these people or some other Native American group that practiced burning of their buildings. I'm thinking it might be another group as my vague recollection of what I encountered (I cannot remember where) was that it was something that took place in the Mississippi River area.

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