The following from anthropologist Lawrence H. Keeley, wherein he discusses the evidence for cannibalism in ancient Central and South America, adds much light on the Book of Mormon’s discussion of cannibalism (cf. Brant Gardner on Human Sacrifice and Cannibalism in Moroni 9:8-10):
Many tribes and chiefdoms in southern Central American and northeastern South America reputedly consumed large numbers of their dead foes and captives. Notwithstanding some king of magical or religious justification for cannibalism, several of these groups seemed to have positively relished human flesh. One record reports that a Colombian chief and his retinue consumed the bodies of 100 enemies in a single day following a victory. In another chiefdom, war captives were kept in special enclosures and fattened before consumption. Many of these groups smoked or otherwise preserved human meat to be eaten later. The Ancerma of western Colombia reportedly lighted their gold mines with lamps fueled by human fat and sold captives to their neighbors for us as food . . . Other instances of culinary cannibalism have been documented by archaeology in places where, according to ethnographic sources, it was supposedly absent. In the American Southwest, for example, twenty-five sites containing cannibalized human remains have been found. These assemblages of disarticulated human bones share a number of features: butchering cut-marks, skulls broken, long bones smashed for marrow extraction, bones burned or otherwise cooked, and disposal with other “kitchen” refuse. At these sites, the treatment of the human bones suspected to represent the remains of cannibal consumption are comparable in almost every respect with the remains of nonhuman food animals. Almost all these occurrences are dated to Pueblo II and III times (A.D. 900-1300), which were periods when droughts appear to have been frequent. The intensively studied remains from Mancos show various pathologies indicative of nutritional deficiencies. Cannibalism in the prehistoric Southwest involved too thorough a consumption of bodies to be merely ritual; instances seem to be too common to represent simple survival cannibalism, and yet they seem to occur when other foods might well have been scarce. Given the very fragmentary condition of the skeletons and the numerous traumas inflicted on them in the course of their consumption, it is usually difficult to tell whether violence accompanied the victim’s deaths. At tone site, the rib of one victim had a projectile point embedded in it; at several sites, the cannibalism and some destruction of structures seem to have been contemporaneous. No one analyzing these bones has uncovered any evidence that the victims died nonviolently, and most analysts accept these cases as indications of intergroup violence . . Finally, there is the celebrated controversy over cannibalism in the Aztec empire, which Marvin Harris refers to as the only “cannibal state.” The argument of some cultural materialists is that the primary goal of Aztec warfare was to capture enemy soldiers for sacrifice and cannibal consumption because densely populated central Mexico had few other sources of animal protein. Their critics claim variously that Aztec warfare was motivated only by a religious desire to capture victims for sacrifice to the gods, that cannibalism was only of the ritual variety and made an insignificant contribution to the diet, or that other sources of sufficient protein did exist. There can be little doubt that the Aztecs annually sacrificed large numbers of war captives in their great temples and that parts of these victims’ bodies were eaten. There were even special recipes for human stews. But the number of such victims, even if they had been completely consumed (which they were not), would not have yielded much protein for such a large population. And if obtaining meat was the object of Aztec warfare, why were only sacrificed captives eaten, and not the bodies of enemies killed on the battlefield? Archaeological excavation of the central temple complex in Mexico City has uncovered ample evidence of human sacrifice but none yet of cannibalism—perhaps because the temple precincts were not where the bodies were consumed. Even if future excavations should turn up abundant evidence of cannibalism, the debate will probably continue, since it principally concerns the motive for Aztec warfare: Did the Aztecs go to war because they were obeying the dictates of their religion to capture for sacrifice or because they needed meat?
Both sides in this debate seem to have ignored the fact that during the century before Cortés, the Aztecs created their great conquest empire by using a very familiar form of warfare leading eventually to the seizure of land and subjugation of enemy societies as tributaries. The most useful spoils the Aztec empire gained by war were an enlarged territory and more taxpayers. As Barry Isaac concludes, the capture of sacrificial victims was “secondary or even incidental” to the political and economic goals of the Aztec ruling elite—however important it may have been to the prestige of the individual Aztec soldier.
Ritual consumption of parts of a foe’s body was very widely distributed. If not exactly common. The parts consumed included brains, hearts, livers, bits of flesh, and the ashes from various parts mixed with a beverage. The purposes given are highly various, but common ones include to humiliate the enemy, to absorb his courage or spirit, to take spiritual as well as corporeal revenge. For example, Zulu warriors drank a soup made from selected “powerful” parts (penis, rectum, right forearm, breastbone, and so on) of a victim as a “strengthening” for battle. In the Solomon Islands, warriors drank blood from the severed head of raid victims to increase their spiritual power, or mana. Many groups in the Americas ate the hearts of slain enemies to absorb the latters’ courage or to achieve an extended form of revenge. The frequency with which similar practices have been reported around the world is evidence that, while hardly the norm, ritual consumption of some part of enemy corpses was by no means rare in prestate warfare. (Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996], 103-6)