by John Keegan
the pitched battle … involved anywhere from two hundred to two thousand warriors and was held in a pre-defined area of no man’s land along the borders of the warring groups. Each army was composed of warriors, usually related by marriage, from several allied villages. Even though large numbers of warriors were involved, there was little or no military effort; instead, dozens of individual duels were engaged in. Each warrior shouted insults at his opponent and hurled spears or fired arrows. Agility in dodging arrows was highly praised and young warriors pranced about. The women often came to watch these wars and would sing or goad their men on. Women also retrieved spent enemy arrows so that their husbands could shoot back at their foes. Regularly occurring pitched battles were generally found among advanced tribal people in fairly dense populations. For instance, this type of warfare was not found in Amazonia, but it was common in highland New Guinea where population density is ten times that of the former area … In spite of the huge array of warriors involved in these pitched battles, little killing took place. Because of the great distance between warriors and the relative inefficiency of primitive weapons, combined with a young warrior’s agility to dodge arrows, direct hits rarely occurred. In the event that someone was badly wounded or slain, the battle would usually cease for that day.35
Some of the elements in this description are uncontentious: for example, the statement that all fighting, until the coming of close-order tactics with standardised weapons, was an affair of individual duels. It is indeed a feature of ritualised battle that casualties tend to be low, and even ‘civilised’ warfare yields examples of something like resort to recognised fields of encounter, if only because geography is sparing with sites where armies can be assembled. Nevertheless it is an idealisation, as the nastier elements in the warfare of the very primitive Yanomamö reveal. It provides an excellent starting-point for a comparison of popular impressions of ritual warmaking with its more complex reality.
The Maring, among whom Andrew Vayda worked in 1962–3 and 1966, then numbered some 7000, living in an area of 190 square miles astride the forested crest of the Bismarck range in central New Guinea. They subsisted by growing tubers in forest ‘gardens’, moved regularly for fallowing, by raising pigs and by a little hunting and gathering, a typical ‘slash and burn’ pattern. Population density was quite high, over a hundred to the square mile — much higher than the Yanomamö’s, and the social unit was a cluster of clans, nominally descended from the same paternity, who took wives from outside. The size of a cluster varied between 200 and 850, occupying a defined area of cultivation along one of the streams rising from the watershed. Borderlands were thinly occupied and some clan clusters benefited from primary forest in their territory, which provided a reserve of untilled land. Below the mountain zone the terrain was unhealthy and population — of quite different language groups — became dense again only at the coast. Before the 1940s, they had no access to metal and the best of their tools and weapons were stone artefacts.36
In material culture, however, the Maring were superior to the Yanomamö, as the nature of their warfare reflected. Besides plain wood bows, arrows and spears, they also possessed polished stone axe-heads and large wooden shields. With these they conducted fights which passed through what the Maring themselves recognised to be carefully regulated phases. The first was what they called ‘nothing’ fights, the second ‘true’ fights, and the third and fourth, not a necessary escalation from fighting, ‘raids’ and ‘routs’.
‘Nothing’ fights, as Vayda described them, most resembled the harmless ritual battles casually supposed to typify primitive warfare.
In these the warriors repaired each morning from their homes to pre-arranged fight grounds at the borders of the lands of the two main belligerent groups. The opposing forces took up positions close enough to each other to be within the range of arrows. Thick wooden shields, as tall as the men and about 2½ feet wide, afforded protection in combat. Sometimes the bottoms of the shields were made to rest on the ground and warriors darted out from behind their shields to shoot their arrows and then darted back. Some men also emerged temporarily from cover in order to taunt their foes and to display their bravery by drawing enemy fire. At the end of each day’s fighting, the men returned to their homes. Although these small bow-and-arrow fights sometimes continued for days or even weeks, deaths or serious injuries in them were rare.37
‘True’ fights differed from ‘nothing’ fights in both tactics and the weapons used. Men brought axes and thrusting spears to the fight ground, and narrowed the range to that of hand-strokes. While bowmen in the rear kept up a hail of arrows, fighters in the front rank duelled from behind their shields, occasionally changing places with the bowmen for a rest; individual warriors were also at liberty to take a breather altogether when their efforts exhausted them. Arrows or throwing-spears might sometimes bring down a man in the front line; then, if the enemy timed a short charge right, he could be finished off with axes or thrusting-spears. However, casualties were still rare, and the battles dragged on for days.
Each morning when there was to be fighting, the able-bodied men … assembled near their hamlets and went en masse to the fight ground for their day’s combat, while the women remained behind to attend to routine gardening and domestic tasks. The men themselves did not fight daily during the period of warfare. When it rained, both sides stayed in their houses, and, by mutual agreement, all combatants sometimes took a day off to repaint their shields, to attend to rituals in connection with casualties, or simply to rest. There could even be intervals as long as three weeks during which active hostilities were suspended and the men worked at making new gardens.38
These rituals, almost incomprehensible as they are to modern man for all the echoes of the fighting under the walls of Troy that they bring, occasionally petered out with the final exchange of arrows. They might, however, lead on to more bloody ‘routing’ when a war party set out from one clan region to deal death and destruction in another; ‘raiding’, a murderous but more limited sort of expedition, seems to have been an alternative to the ‘true’ fight in the ladder of escalation. Routs, on the other hand, were a consequence of ‘true’ fights and resulted in many deaths, of women and children as well as of men, and in the headlong flight of the victims from their settlement.
Maring warfare requires considerable explanation, which Vayda attempts to supply. ‘Nothing’ fights occurred, he says, when slights and offences accumulating during a peaceful cycle eventually merited revenge: they might be as mild as an insult or as serious as murder, with rape, abduction or suspicion of spell-casting somewhere in between. The point of the ‘nothing’ fights was twofold: to test the military strength of the opposition but also to negotiate. Much of the shouting was from mediators, who urged peace. These mediators were often allies, for whom clansmen always looked when war was in the air. They provided an impartial voice, but also evidence of the extra strength available to a party if the other insisted on proceeding to ‘true’ fighting.
‘True’ fighting could bring its own result, which was an acceptance of stalemate; ‘raiding’ might have the same effect. ‘Routing’, however, normally resulted in the displacement of the victims from their settlement, and in the destruction of their houses and gardens. It was the ultimate test, therefore, of which was the stronger party and who might encroach on the territory of a neighbour, an important assessment in a society short of land. Maring fighting, it would seem, was thus ‘ecological’ in motivation: it redistributed land from the weak to the strong. But Vayda also points out that important features of Maring warfare contradicted this. One is that victorious Maring rarely occupied all or even some of a defeated clan’s territory, out of fear that lingering bad magic made it unsafe to do so. Another is that the timing of warmaking always coincided with the readiness of a clan cluster to offer the necessary sacrificial thank-offering to their ancestor spirits for assistance in the fight.
Such thank-offerings took the form of killing and eating
mature pigs, in the ratio of one for each member of the clan cluster. Since it takes about ten years to raise and fatten such a number of surplus pigs, fights only occurred about every ten years; and, strangely, it was only toward the end of a ten-year period that neighbouring clan clusters began to offer each other the slights and injuries which were the occasion of war. To undertake war without the means of thanking ancestor spirits was to court defeat; on the other hand, to have a surplus of pigs without an excuse to eat them was to lose the point of fattening them. Vayda noted that Maring population densities had actually been in decline during their last extended period of fighting, thus calling into question his own explanation that it was shortage of land that caused the Maring to fight. It might indeed be thought that the Maring fought out of habit, perhaps even for the fun of it, rather than for any reason that anthropological theory can advance.
The depiction of war as fun can, of course, too easily slide into trivialisations. Nevertheless, the ‘play’ element in warfare has been taken very seriously by historians of chivalry, for example, while, casting backward in time, any search for the ‘origins’ of fighting inevitably carries us back to man’s early life as a hunter. The weapons of hunting for sport and the toys of play and games originated in the tools of subsistence hunting. Once agriculture, however crude, began to alleviate the relentless necessity to track and kill animals for daily nourishment, hunting, sport, games and even war were destined to achieve a psychological co-existence in early cultures, as indeed the first three do in our own today. It is, in that perspective, not surprising that the Maring should, with the weapons they had to hand, have devised a system of warfare in which the game or play element was so strong; the means to transform the effect of wooden spears and stone axes, wielded by men in a mutually supporting group, from that of mere wounding to true killing agents derived not from those weapons’ intrinsic lethality but from the intentions of the combatants. What should impress us about Maring warfare is not its ‘primitivity’ but its sophistication. At the individual level it must have done much, in a society without aesthetic achievements, to satisfy the human need for self-expression, display and competition, and even, if one accepts that theory, the ‘drive-discharge’ of aggression. At the group level, it provided a medium for impressing on an opposing group the degree of gravity with which transgressions of good-neighbourliness were regarded, and the unpleasant consequences that would flow from a failure to recognise superior might, displayed initially in a symbolic style and in a mood that invited not escalation but diplomacy.
Military historians must fix on the characteristics of the Maring’s weapons above all. Stone axes and bone arrowheads, ‘catalogued [but] uncomprehended’ in Turney-High’s penetrating phrase, imply a human past red in tooth and claw. Confronted by lumps of cunningly flaked flint, the modern mind leaps instantly to the thought of cloven skulls and shattered spines. It may well be that these were the injuries our prehistoric ancestors inflicted on their enemies at whatever risk to their own skins. What we know about the Maring suggests, by contrast, that peoples with Stone Age weapons do not necessarily have a disregard for their own survival. Weapons that are deadly only at close quarters do not thereby impose on those who wield them a necessity to fight at close quarters; to leap to that conclusion would be to adopt a ‘technological determinism’ in human behaviour to which the cautious, tentative and procrastinating character of the Maring’s tactics gives the lie. If the Maring showed reluctance for the decisive battle, showed indeed that they did not consider the point of battle necessarily to be outright victory on the battlefield, then it is permissible to suppose that other peoples at a similar level of material culture did likewise. It is with that thought in mind that we should continue to consider how wooden, stone and bone weapons might have been used in the prehistoric past.
The Maoris
It is a large step to move from consideration of the warfare of peoples as simple in social organisation as those of mountain New Guinea to that of the hierarchical and theocratic chiefdoms of New Zealand, centre of the largest settlements of the Polynesian diaspora across the southern Pacific. It is a leap not merely in time and across cultures but also over a yawning abyss of disagreement among anthropologists about the stages by which primitivity becomes modernity.
The classic anthropological view is that prehistoric human society evolved through the stages of Band, Tribe, Chiefdom to early State. In this typology, the Band is defined as a small group whose members know, or at least believe, that they are related to each other by blood, typically the social organisation of timid and reclusive hunters or gatherers, living under paternal authority, like the Bushmen of South Africa. The Tribe normally shares a belief in common ancestry but is principally united by language and culture and does not necessarily accept headship, though there may be some recognition of authority, usually reinforced by myth, through a father (patrilineal) or mother (matrilineal) descent; tribes tend toward egalitarianism, by anthropological theory.39 But Chiefdoms are hierarchical and usually theocratic, individual members ranking themselves by the distance at which their descent originates from a founding father of divine ancestry. The State, under which most inhabitants of the world live today, is held to have developed from the Chiefdom. Anthropologists, using Max Weber’s famous differentiation, distinguish between chiefdoms and states by their founding of legitimacy in, respectively, ‘traditional’ (or occasionally ‘charismatic’) and ‘legal’ codes.40
Fortunately for the lay person, anthropologists have recently come to prefer a simpler system of classification, which recognises only ‘egalitarian’ and ‘hierarchical’ societies in the stage before statehood.41 The reason for this change of view — not universally accepted — is that many of the simpler societies found by ethnographers in the less accessible regions of the world — mountains, forests, arid and desert zones — have now been identified as refugees from oppression by stronger neighbours; their social structures have been degraded by flight, dispersion, economic hardship and the devaluation of their myths and authority systems by the ordeal that displacement brought. This interpretation is galling to those who have committed themselves to belief in the existence of stateless societies formed by cultural choice or by adaptation to their surroundings, but the star of that sort of anthropology is in decline.42 It is made galling to others, however, by the greater importance the new interpretation accords to warfare, particularly when the motivation to war is harshly defined as a competition for scarce resources.43
While the society of the Maring is not like a state at all (that of the Yanomamö is thought by some to be that elusive thing, pristine aboriginality), that of the Maoris of New Zealand approached very closely to statehood, if only by the tests of capacity to construct major public works and conduct large-scale warfare over extended distances. The Maoris were certainly not short of food, even though they succeeded in their first 600 or 800 years of settlement in New Zealand in exterminating some eighteen species of bird, including the giant, flightless moa.44 On the other hand, inter-island migration probably had as its principal cause a progressive rise in population densities which, when intensification of production, infanticide, ‘voyaging’ and warfare failed to stem the pressure, led to the extrusion of whole groups. The Polynesians who arrived in New Zealand, possibly about AD 800, may have been ‘voyagers’ of the Viking sort, adventurous young men, landless like Leif Ericksson and seeking a Vinland to the south, or they may have been refugees from a victorious chief in their home island; perhaps they were lucky castaways.45 By whatever means they made their landfall, they brought with them the staples of Polynesian life, and also its institutions, chiefdoms descended by myth from the gods, social rank and military specialisation. They brought, too, the artefacts of island life, including wooden weapons — the spear and the club — to which worked shell, coral, bone or stone lent deadly edges. It was with these weapons that the Maori, in the wide spaces of the North and South Islands, were eventually to practise a form of
warfare from which rulers of states in the ages of iron or even gunpowder would have had little to learn.
The source of a Polynesian chief’s power was twofold: it derived from mana, his priestly duty to mediate between man and god, and from taboo, his right to dedicate a portion of the fruits of the earth and the waters given by the gods to a religious purpose. That might be ritual feasting, sacrifice or temple-building, but it effectively entailed taxation and often the direction of labour. Chiefs could therefore demand, and even compel, an important extension of the powers of mere headship in simpler and more egalitarian societies, whose members looked to the headman only for mediation, advice and leadership. The need to intensify production on islands experiencing population pressure empowered a Polynesian chief to demand communal effort in farming, fishing, building, even irrigation works; if rising population pressure fomented war, it further empowered the chief, particularly if he acquired a reputation as a toa, warrior, to compel men to accept his military commands.46
It has been convincingly argued that the Maori chiefdoms in New Zealand found it easier to relieve population pressure by making war on neighbours with productive land than to hack into virgin forest, of which much remained even at the coming of the European settlers in the 1840s. Chiefs could wage such wars because they could demand their followers’ presence, could provide campaign supplies, could mobilise long-distance transport, such as fleets of canoes, and, if they had political skills, could articulate communal grievances against an enemy.
Maori warfare followed a familiar pattern. The occasion of war was always a desire for revenge, which might or might not be satisfied by a raiding party finding and killing a single member of the enemy. Maori war parties could do battle in a very brutal way. After a public meeting at which ‘offences would be recounted vehemently’, warlike songs chanted and weapons displayed, the war party would set out. If it met the enemy in the open and succeeded in breaking his ranks, the rout that followed had gruesome consequences: