Another bomb in Baghdad, another soldier killed in Kabul. A remembrance service for the dead of a battle long ago, a rogue state testing missiles for a conflict yet to come. Warfare is all around us, but for me it has only taken place in distant lands. I grew up during the cold war and live in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7, but I have never experienced war first-hand and pray that I never will. Not so for millions of others throughout the world and throughout history.
“Are we an inherently violent species, prone to waging war?”
Why so much war and violence? Perhaps we are an inherently violent species, prone not just to interpersonal violence but also to what the anthropologist Brian Ferguson of Rutgers University, New Jersey, has described as “organised, purposeful group action directed against another group involving the actual or potential application of lethal force” – that is, war. Reports of apparently planned, deliberate killing by chimpanzees in one group of those in another, as described in Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson’s 1997 book Demonic Males, have led some to fear that this is indeed the case – that a murderous instinct is an indelible part of our evolutionary heritage. If chimpanzees are taken to reflect our earliest ancestry, and warring tribes such as the Yanomami of the Amazon region – made infamous by Napoleon Chagnon’s 1968 book subtitled “The fierce people” – are representative of the pristine traditional society of modern humans, then it may indeed appear that war has always been with us. If so, we must conclude that it will remain for as long as our species survives upon this planet.
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Such a bleak conclusion is all too easy to reach when there is so much war around us and in our history books. That does not mean it is right. Like us, those killer chimpanzees are members of the modern world, and they may have been responding to unnatural conditions created by habitat restriction. The other species of chimpanzee, the bonobo, appears to lack such aggressive instincts, and resolves tension by sex rather than violence. The bonobo has just as many credentials to be a model for the human past. Similarly, some argue that Yanomami warfare is a product of European contact rather than a “natural” state for that society. Even if it is not, there is no reason to treat the Yanomami as typical of our prehistoric forebears. The only way to know about the past is to look at the evidence from the past itself.
The Archaeology of Warfare does just that, and does it extremely well. It addresses not only the question of whether warfare has been ubiquitous during the human past, but also its causes and the consequences for social change, especially the development of chiefdom and state societies. The book is an edited collection of 13 chapters, 10 of which are case studies of warfare in tribal and chiefdom societies, providing an impressive global coverage. The remaining three are review essays drawing on evidence from many periods and places.
Archaeological evidence for warfare is not easy to interpret. Fortifications and weapons may be intended for symbolic display rather than bloody conflict. Battles might be fought far from any settlements and remain archaeologically invisible or undiscovered. To understand why wars begin, archaeologists need evidence about the conflict itself as well as the environmental, economic and social context before, during and after the conflict. Trying to unravel cause and effect can be challenging. If, for instance, a collection of skeletons showing signs of slaughter also have signs of malnutrition, how can we know whether it was a shortage of food that led to conflict, or warfare that led to starvation?
It’s no surprise that archaeologists don’t agree about how their evidence should be interpreted. In 1996 Lawrence Keeley published his controversial work Warfare Before Civilization, which argued that warfare has indeed been ubiquitous in the human past. It is frequently cited in this new volume of essays, and while some authors concur with its conclusions, others are adamantly opposed. Brian Ferguson is in the latter camp, believing that Keeley too freely imposes an ethnographic present onto the prehistoric past. He reviews the impact that western contact had on traditional people, arguing that this dramatically intensified what were relatively limited degrees of conflict. He also reviews the earliest archaeological evidence, beginning with the skeletal remains of the Neanderthals. The challenge with such material is not only its scarcity but in distinguishing between interpersonal violence and the planned group action that amounts to war. My reading of the evidence he provides is that war is mainly a product of sedentary, farming societies.
The review essay by Stephen LeBlanc, director of collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, is much more sympathetic to Keeley’s “war has always been with us” proposition. His prime concern is with the role that warfare played in the transition from tribal societies with limited, if any, hierarchical social stratification, to chiefdoms. This transition, he argues, often occurred when one tribe took over what had been a “no-man’s-land” between it and other tribes, thus increasing its land, resources and eventually population density. This led to the emergence of elites, and transformed the nature of warfare as chiefs could mobilise labour to build fortifications and invest in military technology.
While these review essays are useful, it is the detailed case studies that are most valuable. They all provide fascinating reading. I was particularly impressed by the study of tribal warfare on the North American Great Plains prior to European contact, which showed a correlation between climate change and conflict intensity, and also with the analysis of warfare and state development in the Oaxaca valley, Mexico. This focuses on the development of Monte Albán, a site where the brutal slaughter of captives was dramatically recorded in galleries of carved stone images. Such carvings remind us that an ideology of conflict frequently becomes embedded within the culture of a society: the young become socialised with the virtues of violence and the elite become dependent on war to legitimise and sustain their position.
It is when ancient ideologies of conflict meet new technology that levels of death and destruction often become extreme. Mark Allen of California State Polytechnic University provides a superb account of the changes in Maori warfare, finishing with how the ancient pattern of fighting for revenge – sustainable for many centuries when this was done with clubs – led to between 20,000 and 50,000 deaths in a couple of decades after muskets were acquired from Europeans.
What these and the other studies in this volume show is that we cannot rely on recent history to understand the nature of warfare and the depth or otherwise of our violent nature. Archaeology provides an essential long-term and global perspective for exploring the interactions between social organisation, cultural values, environmental change, economy and technology in the cause of war and as the consequence of war. The archaeological record suggests that there were long periods when warfare was either absent or sporadic in human society. Unfortunately these appear to have been long, long ago, and the (pre)history of humankind indicates that by the time the bombs in Baghdad have ceased, they will have started up elsewhere.
The Archaeology of Warfare: Prehistories of raiding and conquest
University Press of Florida
