• In This Corner: Now Playing - February 10

• Joe Louis and Social History
• Sports Writing in Sport's Golden Age
• Excerpt from "Ulysses"

• Sea of Tranquility: Now in Previews

• The Question of Therapy
• Santa Fe
• Excerpt from "Did Cannibalism Kill Anasazi Civilization?"
• Poem: "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World"

• Education Experiences

• Travel to New York with the Globe

• Upcoming Nights at the Globe

PHOTOS:(L-R) Al White as “Blackburn” and Dion Graham as “Joe Louis;” (L-R) Dion Graham, Katie Barrett, Rufus Collins, Al White and T. Ryder Smith; L-R) Rufus Collins as “Max Schmeling,” David Deblinger as “Jacobs” and John Keabler as “The Boxer;” photos by Craig Schwartz.

IN THIS CORNER NOW PLAYING!

JAN 5 - FEB 10
By Steven Drukman
Directed by Ethan McSweeny
Cassius Carter Centre Stage

This thrilling world-premiere play was commissioned by the Globe to be featured in the Carter’s unique arena space, ideally suited to a boxing ring setting. In 1938, there was no bigger sporting event than the bout between German boxer Max Schmeling and American “Brown Bomber” Joe Louis. World War II is about to change how Americans view the world around them and this fight elevated Louis from African-American hero to All-American icon. In 1970, the two men reunite in the most unlikely of places: a psychiatric ward. The Cassius Carter Centre Stage becomes the ultimate arena and every seat is ringside as the decisive battle begins – for honor, country, and for self-respect.


Read more about the cast and creative team

See actual footage of the Louis/Schmeling fights!
1936 Fight
1938 Fight

Union-Tribune Article

Buy Tickets

The Old Globe would like to thank the following sponsors who have generously underwritten this production of In This Corner:
	THE EDGERTON FOUNDATION

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Joe Louis and Social History

The following is taken from Ringside by Bud Schulberg,
Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2006

Joe Louis

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man was an apt title for the entire black race in America in the 1930s. In the eyes of white people, it simply did not exist. The New York Times’ boast that it printed “all the news that’s fit to print,” should have added “for white people.” When young Joe Louis was winning amateur boxing titles in the early ’30s, the outstanding black men in our country, like W.E.B. DuBois and A. Phillip Randolph, were nonpersons to every white newspaper. Even famous entertainers like Louis Armstrong, Paul Robeson and Bojangles Robinson were ignored. For a black baseball player to play in the big leagues was unthinkable. The National Football League was no better, and as for the colleges, when a Southern college objected to playing Columbia with its one black player, New York’s great liberal arts college obligingly dropped him from the lineup.

-more-

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Sports Writing in Sport's Golden Age

By Jerry Patch, Co-Artistic Director

The period following WWI leading to the Great Depression is known as The Golden Age of Sports: a time when America began celebrating its leading sportsmen as national heroes, and sportswriters like Grantland Rice built their legends in column inches of purple prose. It was also a time when sport became commerce: when the erstwhile orphan Babe Ruth earned the salary of a titan of industry, and Jack Dempsey earned more in one fight than Ruth did in his entire career.

There were no moving pictures of sport that delivered news in a timely fashion, so writers like Rice pumped up sport’s volume with a style known as “Gee Whiz!” Hyperbole and alliteration were its hallmarks: Ruth was The Sultan of Swat; Dempsey the Manassa Mauler; and Rice went to apocalyptic mythology to describe Notre Dame’s backfield: The Four Horsemen.

By the 1930s, sportswriters had created new audiences and a much more lucrative platform for their narratives. Newspapers and sports promoters were cashing in on the markets their stories created, but they needed to create more stories of fabled athletes to sustain it. After Dempsey, there were no outstanding heavyweights journalists could celebrate to capture the boxing public’s fancy.

-more-

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Excerpt from “Ulysses,”
By Alfred Lord Tennyson

I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought...
...There lies the port: the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads - you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

SEA OF TRANQUILITY: Now in Previews

JAN 12 - FEB 10
By Howard Korder
Directed by Michael Bloom
Old Globe Theatre

Award-winning Old Globe Playwright-in-Residence Howard Korder’s Sea of Tranquility was named one of Time Magazine’s best plays of 2004. In this clever and often hilarious play, a psychologist and his wife sell their house in Connecticut to start a new life in the southwest. His attempts to heal an eclectic string of patients gradually reveal a surprising mystery – both in his past, and in the human condition. New York’s Village Voice cheered, “Korder’s tremendous gift for language crackles with surprise and creates scenes that build to intense heat.”

Read more about the cast and creative team

Union-Tribune article

Buy Tickets

The Old Globe would like to thank the following sponsors who have generously underwritten this production of Sea of Tranquility:

For more than a decade, Continental Airlines has provided Globe artists non-stop service between San Diego and Continental Airlines’ New York area hub, Newark Liberty International Airport. Continental Airlines has always been committed to the community, supporting charitable organizations of various interests and concerns across the country. Continental Airlines’ previous production support includes underwriting for Restoration Comedy, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Take Me Out, Bus Stop, Stones in His Pockets and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.

Irving Hughes is San Diego's largest commercial real estate company that exclusively represents tenants. Jason Hughes, Principal of Irving Hughes represented the Globe in the acquisition of the Globe Technical Center in southeastern San Diego. The new 42,000 square-foot Technical Center will house the Theatre’s scene shop and warehouse. The Globe is grateful to Irving Hughes for finding the property for the Technical Center and generously supporting the Globe.

Microsoft is one of the largest corporate contributors in the United States high-tech industry to non-profit organizations. Microsoft employees are also some of the most generous employees giving both financially and volunteering their time to improve communities around the world. The Old Globe is appreciative of Microsoft’s in-kind donation of products and licenses, which support the theatre’s high quality artistic and education programs.

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The Question of Therapy

By Kim Monteilbano Heil, Literary Associate

DOES TALK THERAPY REALLY WORK?

Annette Bening and Brian Cox from screenplay Running with Scissors.

The question is deceptively complicated. In recent years, the effectiveness of psychotherapy – regarded as the basis of talk therapy as it’s currently practiced – has been called into question by medical professionals and critics alike. But measuring the success of talk therapy poses many challenges.

For one, the experience of talk therapy is as different as the patients and the practitioners themselves. In other words, no two therapies are alike. Some therapists focus on dealing with the past, while others believe that correcting a person’s thought patterns and/or behavior is most beneficial. More and more therapists prefer cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) over traditional psychotherapy, emphasizing that reviewing the past is not only unnecessary to healing, but can be counterproductive. These practitioners believe that it is not important for patients to return to the origins of their problems; rather, they should correct the errors in perceptions that lead them to the conclusion that life is hopeless.

Another complicating factor is a patient’s regimen of medications, often prescribed as part of the overall therapy. A November 1995 study concluded that “psychotherapy alone did not differ in effectiveness from medication pluspsychotherapy.” However, a later study reported that a combination of therapy and medication is “often the best way to treat depression.” Other findings indicated that while drug therapy relieved symptoms faster, talk therapy was more effective over a longer period of time. There is also the question of who the therapist is. In a 1995 study, psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers did not differ in their effectiveness, and all did better than marriage counselors and family doctoring. Treatment by mental-health specialists yielded significantly better results than care administered by primary care physicians. Still, the generalized nature of such conclusions precludes an accurate assessment of what kind of individual offers the most effective therapy.

Talk therapy can work. But how, why, and with whom are not as clear. For those seeking treatment, perhaps the better question is: “Can therapy work for me?” With that question, one at least knows where to begin finding answers.

* * * * *

SANTA FE

By Kim Monteilbano Heil, Literary Associate

Santa Fe, NM is known as a tourist destination, a haven for the rich and famous, and a Mecca for artists and writers. But many locals know another side of Santa Fe, where separate communities frequently find themselves at odds with each other. The divide between wealth and poverty in Santa Fe has been cited as a cause for a recent crime wave, according to the Santa Fe Reporter (November 2006).

“Whenever there is income disparity, there is more crime,” non-profit program manager Sara Koplik stated. “And Santa Fe is incredibly disparate – to the level of Latin America.”

The physical proximity between the separate communities is often so close that new homes and lavishly remodeled blocks sit beside older bungalows dating back to the 19th century. Sunset Magazine reported that the rising price of real estate was forcing fourth- and fifth-generation Santa Fe residents to move outside the city limits for affordable housing. Thomas Chavez, the director of the Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe’s historical museum, advised, “If you want to live [in Santa Fe], you have to come here wealthy or else take a vow of poverty.”

-more-

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Did Cannibalism Kill Anasazi Civilization?

Excerpt from article by Julie Cart, The Japan Times,
July 13, 1999

CHACO CANYON, NM - It is one of the great prehistoric puzzles: What caused the Anasazi people, who had one of the most sophisticated civilizations in North America, to abandon their beautiful stone dwellings in the mid-12th century? What made families walk away, seemingly in great haste, leaving behind food cooking over fires and sandals hanging on pegs?...

...Now, at least one chilling explanation has come forth from physical anthropologist Christy Turner. With the publication this spring of “Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest," which he wrote with his late wife, anthropologist Jacqueline Turner, he has managed to anger Native Americans, rile scientists, horrify New Agers and provide a fascinating theoretical glimpse into the collapse of a great civilization... .

Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

...The book debunks the traditional view of the Anasazi as peaceful agriculturists, whose modern-day descendants are the highly spiritual Hopi, Zuni and Pueblo peoples... .

... Turner contends that a “band of thugs" - Toltecs, for whom cannibalism was part of religious practice - made their way to Chaco Canyon from central Mexico. These invaders used cannibalism to overwhelm the unsuspecting Anasazi and terrorize the populace into submission over a period of 200 years... .

-more-

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Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
By Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.

EDUCATION EXPERIENCES

EDUCATION PARTNERS
Giving Schools the Extra Edge

By Roberta Wells-Famula, Director of Education

Public schools that strive to provide quality theatre training for their students must struggle for resources that will help them to reach their goals. How will they give their students opportunities to see great plays when they don’t have the funding to buy tickets? How will their teachers learn new techniques and enhance their skills when they don’t have time to take more college course work? How will they give their students opportunities to meet and learn from professional theatre artists?

For five San Diego area schools those questions can be answered with one name: The Old Globe. Over the years The Old Globe has partnered with a variety of schools to provide much-needed support and programming. The Education Department has long been committed to helping teachers to reach their instructional goals and to encourage their students to attend plays and learn more about possible careers in professional theatre.

A partner high school student enjoys an autograph session with actor, Matt Cavenaugh, after a free student matinee of A Catered Affair.

Starting with our youngest constituents, The Old Globe has entered into a partnership with Valencia Park Center for Academics, Drama and Dance in Southeast San Diego. This magnet school is one of the very few primary schools with a real focus on the performing arts. Imagine a public elementary school with not one, but two full-time theatre teachers who are committed to providing excellent classes and productions with their young students. The Old Globe supports Valencia Park’s efforts and will be working with the teachers to provide technical support, training seminars, in-classroom workshops, and opportunities for students to attend age-appropriate shows and behind- the-scenes tours of the theatre.

San Diego High School’s School of the Arts, Coronado School of the Arts, School for the Creative and Performing Arts and the brand new Lincoln High School Center for the Arts are four institutions that have a strong focus on theatre. These schools give their students excellent opportunities to participate in theatre in all capacities. Through solid training in the performance and technical aspects of theatre, students are preparing for possible higher education or careers in professional theatre. High schools gain special benefits as Old Globe partners: Theatre students attend all of the free student matinees that the Theatre offers. They participate in pre and post show workshops that, over the course of the school year, amount to a free artist residency in their school that will enhance the standards for theatre education that their teacher is trying to meet.

These schools will benefit from teacher seminars held at the theatre with various Globe staff members. These seminars will provide an opportunity for teachers to learn from theatre professionals and to ask questions and glean information that will support their professional growth. The Old Globe stands ready to support the growth and integrity of our partner schools.

Theatre teachers participate in an OldGlobe professional development seminar.

Partnerships are a commitment that two entities make to one another. The OldGlobe has been a part of the San Diego theatre scene for over 70 years but many people in San Diego have never set foot in any of its spaces. School partnerships can serve to change that. When children come home from a free matinee, or regale their families with stories of the great theatre workshop they had in their classroom, they are sharing the great news that there is an amazing and worthwhile arts organization that is worthy of notice. The Old Globe constantly seeks to expand its audiences and to attract them to its shows. Through outreach programs such as the Partners in Education Initiatives, The Old Globe is working to welcome new audiences through service to the community as well as the high quality theatre for which it is known.

TRAVEL TO NEW YORK WITH THE GLOBE

Join the Globe for our annual trip to New York from May 22-28, 2008.
You’ll see David Mamet’s new comedy, November, starring Nathan Lane along with two other exciting Broadway productions.  Your trip includes round-trip air from San Diego, 7 days/6 nights in a first-class hotel and guided tours throughout the city, all for just $2,895 plus applicable airline taxes.

For more information, please call (619) 231-1941 ext. 2317 or email TheatreTrips@TheOldGlobe.org.

NIGHTS AT THE GLOBE

Photos by J. Katarzyna Woronowicz

WINE LOVERS NIGHT- Add $16 to your ticket price*
Friday, January 18 - Choose In This Corner OR Sea of Tranquility

Taste a variety of samples at this casual pre-show party. Includes a hosted wine bar and tasting, with a selection of cheeses and fruit. Sponsored by Hope Wine.

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THANK GLOBE IT'S FRIDAY! - Add $19 to your ticket price*
Friday, January 25 - Choose In This Corner OR Sea of Tranquility

Kick off the weekend in style with friends at TGIF Martini Nights, our music-filled pre-show bash! Includes a hosted wine and martini bar, delicious appetizers and dessert, and live music from a local San Diego artist. Sponsored by Terra Restaurant and Catering. Featured Performer: Taran Gray.

ALL EVENTS TAKE PLACE FROM 6:30 - 7:45 PM IN THE GLOBE'S LOWER PLAZA, JUST STEPS AWAY FROM YOUR THEATRE SEATS.
They’re a festive way to relax and unwind before a stimulating evening of theatre, and the best way to connect with friends you invite to join you at the performance!

CALL TO RSVP - AND ASK US HOW TO ADD PRE-SHOW EVENTS TO YOUR 2008 SEASON SUBSCRIPTIONS!
*In this Corner Tickets = $54; Sea of Tranquility Tickets = $56.

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Spend and Evening OUT AT THE GLOBE
Thursday, January 24 - Choose In This Corner OR Sea of Tranquility

An evening for gay and lesbian theatre lovers and the whole GLBT community. This event includes a hosted wine and martini bar, delicious appetizers, door prizes
and a pre-show mixer. Everyone is welcome.
Sponsored by Terra Restaurant and Catering

Be sure to RSVP for "OUT AT THE GLOBE" when ordering!

Joe Louis and Social History continued

It’s only against that backdrop of know-nothing, racial prejudice that the impact of Joe Louis can be understood. The heart of the Joe Louis story is his historic break through the race barrier. Earlier in the century there had been another great black champion, Jack Johnson, but there was no way he could challenge for the heavyweight title in America. He had to chase the champion all over the world before finally catching up with him in Australia. There he beat on the hapless white Tommy Burns so fiercely that the police finally intervened at the end of the fourteenth round.

Joe Louis and Max Schmeling

The myopic racism of the day was nakedly expressed by Jack London, at ringside to cover the fight for the New York Herald. “He is a white man and so am I,” wrote this avowed socialist who preached international understanding (apparently for whites only). “Naturally I want the white man to win.” And when Johnson’s hand was raised, London called on the undefeated ex-champion, Jim Jeffries, to come out of retirement to put this overweening black boy in his place. “But one thing remains,” London begged in his post-mortem for the Herald, “Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farms and remove that smile from Johnson’s face. Jeff, it’s up to you.”

“The Fight Between the White Champion and the Black Champion,” as it was billed in Reno in 1910, was less a boxing match than a primitive tableau in bitter race relations. In Jeffries’ corner were all the previous champions, the impassioned Caucasians John L. Sullivan, Bob Fitzsimmons, and “Gentleman” Jim Corbett, who mouthed racist epithets at Johnson through the fight. When the hopelessly overmatched old champion finally went down for the count, a deathly silence fell over the crowd. As our bereft Jack London typed out his lead, “Once again has Johnson sent down to defeat the chosen representative of the white race…,” race riots were breaking out all over the country.

As a resented black champion in a rabid white world, Johnson did nothing to endear himself. In a time of uptight segregation, Johnson not only consorted with white women but flaunted them, lording it around Chicago in a chauffeur-driven open phaeton, with two white women all over him. The entrance to his notorious nightclub Café de Champion displayed a blowup photo of him lip-locking with his white wife. Her suicide, partly due to his having so many other white lovers, including a scandalous affair with his white eighteen-year-old secretary, provoked a lynch atmosphere with Johnson being railroaded to jail and jumping bond to escape to Europe, leaving behind the unwritten law of boxing: never again a black heavyweight champion.

It may have been unwritten in the 1910s and ’20s but it was adhered to as faithfully as if it had been engraved in stone. After the gifted troublemaker Johnson held up his black middle finger to white America, there would be eight successive flour-faced champions through the 1920s to the late ’30s. The most frustrating example of a top heavyweight contender being denied his deserved title shot because of the wrong pigmentation was Harry Wills. When Wills knocked out a brace of white contenders and clearly outclassed the “Wild Bull of the Pampas,” Luis Firpo, famous for knocking Jack Dempsey out of the ring in the first round of their celebrated fight, the New York State Athletic Commission finally made Wills its No. 1 contender, ruling that Dempsey could not defend his title until he met Wills. Dempsey’s promoter, the same old foxy Tex Rickard from Johnson-Jeffries days, finessed that one by taking his champion to Philadelphia to face Gene Tunney. The white race was saved again.

As a young fight fan growing up in Los Angeles, I knew an impressive heavyweight by the name of George Godfrey. When I asked him about fighting in Madison Square Garden, in those days the pot of gold at the end of every boxer’s rainbow, he shook his head. “Only if I lost, son. My color can’t win in the Garden.” That
was the hard truth when teenaged Joe Louis was coming out of the Bottoms, a ghetto within the ghetto in hard-times Detroit.

Sports Writing in Sport's Golden Age continued

Without Ruthian heroes, sportswriters turned cynical, occasionally mocking the athletes and the patrons. Red Smith, the next great sportswriter after Rice, tweaked a fur-coated crowd at a Harvard-Yale football game with the line, “the fans rose as one raccoon.” As early as the 1930s, Rice spoke to the corruption of sport by money, writing:

Money to the left of the and money to the right
Money everywhere they turned from morning to the night
Only two things count at all from mountain to the sea
Part of it’s percentage, and the rest is guarantee.

As Joe Pollack, former columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch observed, the sportswriters of the time were akin to drama critics: they saw the events, analyzed them, and voiced their opinions in their coverage. They became the eyes and ears for the millions across the country without access to the events.

Notre Dame's backfield: The Four Horseman

When radio coverage of athletics began, a new immediacy was introduced to sports reporting. While still unable to see the events literally, the “words-eye view” given by broadcasters fed the imaginations of listeners nation-wide, and delivered the news as it happened.

The second Louis-Schmeling bout from Yankee Stadium in New York was fought before 70,000 fans onsite. In an America of 130 million, an estimated 70 million listened in—numbers akin to the Super Bowl, the Oscars and the World Series all taken together. And millions more listened abroad.

At mid-century, two things changed sports writing: major league sports expanded to the western half of the country, bringing the events first-hand to that part of the U.S.; and sporting events began to be televised.

In 1971 sportscaster Vince Scully said absolutely nothing for nearly a full minute of air time following a crippled Kirk Gibson’s gamewinning World Series home run. He let the pictures of the athletes and the roaring crowd tell the story. By then the florid language used to cover the sports by Rice had devolved over decades to a simpler style, and broadcasters had learned to let the event speak for itself.

Santa Fe continued

The division is not merely economic. Santa Fe is known as “The City of Three Cultures,” a name which refers to the Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo-American cultures. But the name is an oversimplification of the collision between the three communities. “We’re different cultures within cultures,” Chavez went on to say. “It’s a mixture. In Spanish, mestizaje. It’s a concept that has to do with everything from food to music to blood.”

Santa Fe Vintage postcard

Conflicts revolve around claims to the land, which began as early as the mid-1500s, when the Navajo people fought against the Spaniards who moved in from the southeast-battles that lasted until the late 1800s. Warring was not limited to invaders, however; the Anasazi, another southwestern tribe of Native Americans, fought each other and reportedly became victims of cannibalism (see article on page 11). More recently, new arrivals to Santa Fe have included retirees, celebrities, and the very wealthy. People of privilege and means have catapulted housing prices in Santa Fe, making in-town purchases impossible for descendants of families that have been there for generations.

As local artist Lynda Feman told the New York Times, “Santa Fe is impossible. I’ve lived here for 25 years, and I’m maxed out. It needs to change.”

Anasazi Civilization continued

The Anasazi fled the oppressive cultists and sought haven deep in remote canyons. The next time any part of the culture appeared, these Pueblo people were found to have constructed elaborate dwellings adhered to the sheer sides of cliffs.

Generations of scientists have postulated that such suspended villages - located far from water - represented a fear of a great foe. Turner suggests the Anasazi took up these defensive positions against a horrible enemy - the evil that had infiltrated their own people... .

Anasazi cliff dwelling

...The notion that the Hopi - revered by scholars as wise and gentle astronomers who lived in an enlightened society - would be capable of killing and eating members of their own clan stunned scientists.

Anthropologists acknowledge than any theory that seems to portray Pueblo Indians in a negative light would be hard to sell.

“Our understanding of the Anasazi is exactly parallel to what was thought of the Maya years ago - this advanced society responsible for beautiful things, that now we realize was not a peaceful place," said David Wilcox, curator of the Museum of Northern Arizona.

“We are in a period where everything Native American is (seen as) spiritual, sensitive and wonderful. We would like to believe that all of the nasty stuff was introduced by the Europeans, and before that it was all truth, beauty and love. Sorry, that's just not so. These were complex societies. We are all capable of doing those things."