War Before Civilization

by Lawrence H Keeley

  As previously mentioned, economic exchanges and intermarriages have been especially rich sources of violent conflict. Primitive exchange was subject to all the defaults and miscarriages that bedevil civilized commerce, as well as some others that were peculiar to premarket economies. In the absence of impartial third-party arbitration or adjudication, disputes involving exchange could and often did escalate into wars.

  In most tribal economies, the great bulk of commodities were exchanged through various forms of reciprocity rather than by direct barter or purchase. These types of exchanges involved the mutual giving of “gifts” between individuals or groups. The giver expected a gift of similar value in return, either immediately or at some later time. Failure in this regard could engender a grievance that immediately escalated into warfare (if the commodity involved was especially crucial or valuable) or create a smoldering resentment that predisposed the aggrieved party toward violence at the next pretext or provocation. In tribal societies, failure to reciprocate or to reciprocate fully was equivalent to default or fraud in a more commercial system.

  One common source of wars over trade arose when one social group held a monopoly over a particular commodity—usually because the only source lay within its territory.20 Such monopolies could lead to a premercantile form of price gouging or to envy and resentment on the part of those groups less favored by geography. The two commodities that served almost universally as the foci of such tribal conflicts were hard stone (for tools) and mineral salt. Both were usually available only at rare locations; one was a technological necessity before metallurgy, and the other was a physiological necessity where the that consisted primarily of plant foods.21 The Salt Wars fought among several northern California tribes in the early nineteenth century provide a good example of this phenomenon. The territory of the Northeastern or Salt Pomo of northern California included a salt seep that produced a remarkably pure crystalized sodium chloride. Many nearby tribes came to this seep to obtain salt. But although special friends were occasionally allowed to gather salt without payment, the usual procedure was for the salt-gathering party to give gifts—in proportion to the salt taken—to the Salt Pomo for permission to use the seep. When one party of Indians from a neighboring tribe that usually brought gifts tried to gather salt surreptitiously, they were caught by the Salt Pomo and nearly annihilated. This incident and the Salt Pomo’s high-handed treatment of some other “customers” touched off a series of wars that continued intermittently over a generation.22 In the early stages of colonization, European trading posts and settlements constituted similar “point sources” of metal and other useful commodities that could be monopolized by the local tribes. In the Americas, many wars were fought against middleman tribes by “consumer” tribes for direct access to such outposts.23

  Trade and warfare could also find intimate connection through the not uncommon practice of killing and robbing traders or trading parties.24 Traders could be waylaid by tribes whose territory they were transiting or even by those with whom they had come to trade. Parties to primitive exchanges who yielded to the lure of short-term profits over long-term gains by killing and robbing traders usually found that war had to be included in the balance.

  Finally we come to systems of exchange referred to earlier in this chapter: extortion or forcible exchange.25 For example, the Pueblos of the Rio Grande region of New Mexico “found it advantageous to trade with marauding Co-manches and Navajos, even when they were ill-provisioned, in an effort to avoid crop thefts and wanton destruction.” Hopi farmers in Arizona never knew whether approaching Apaches were coming to trade or to raid and plunder. In their uncertainty, they relied on omens: if a rain cloud was sighted in the direction of the approaching Apaches, the Hopi expected trade; but if no clouds were observed, every precaution was taken against a raid. Since their pueblos were essentially oases in a desert and rain clouds were rare, the Hopi seldom must have admitted an Apache party to their mesa top until its peaceful intentions were completely established. This fearful expectancy of the Hopi and their relief at finding that their visitors came this time only to trade cannot have hurt the Apaches’ chances of getting the corn they wanted at a reasonable price.26 The implicit threat of raids by the nomadic Plains tribes may have given similar impetus to their trade for corn with the sedentary villagers of the Upper Missouri tribes, such as the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. In a fashion analogous to the relationship in South America between the Mbaya horsemen and the Guana farmers of the Grand Chaco, the tough Teton Sioux were said to have held Arikara villagers “in a position approaching complete subjugation,” obtaining gifts of corn from them at regular intervals. These cases and many others may reflect the consequences of the common imbalance between trading partners that bedeviled systems of barter. Often one group desperately needed some item from another party; but either it had little that the other party wanted, or the “sellers” had no surplus of the desired item to trade. The temptation to extort what was needed by the threat of violence or to seize it as plunder was very strong in such situations. When raiding became a frequent substitute for trade, as it often did when poorer nomads exchanged goods with richer villagers and townspeople, trade could verge on extortion.

  Some rare tribes dropped the pretense of exchange altogether and simply took what they required in raids.27 For some bands of Mescalero and Chiricahua Apaches, plunder from raids was the primary source of certain basic commodities. The Tuareg tribesmen of the Sahara took what food they pleased from Arab oasis dwellers and acquired other useful or prestigious goods by raiding caravans. Acquiring some goods, because suppliers were loathe to part with them, necessitated forceful seizure. Slaves were the best example of such “commodities,” since ultimately (wherever slavery was practiced) they were drawn from war captives. Few people were so desperate that they would trade away their children and kin, especially knowing the burdens and humiliations of slavery. But once forcibly extracted from the protection of their families and tribes, slaves were freely traded. The wholesale substitution of brigandage and piracy for exchange was unusual, however, probably because paying for goods with human lives was socially expensive and because any augmentations in the strength of one’s victims could raise “prices” to unacceptable levels.

  If trade often leads to war, marriage—which has usually been as much an economic transaction as a sexual or romantic one—can play a similar role.28 In addition, intermarriages between social units mean that any difficulties that afflict such unions are likely to cause ill-feeling between the groups concerned. In cultures where young girls were promised to men in other social groups by their fathers, violent disputes occurred when (for various reasons) the bride was not “delivered” when she came of age. Disappointed suitors could take violent exception to their rejection, triggering a war. In situations where payment of the bride-price or dowry was made in installments, failure to deliver a payment as promised could lead to fighting. Spousal abandonment or divorce usually entailed refunding the bride-price or dowry; but since this had often been spent or distributed to others in the meantime, reimbursement was often refused and a war resulted. In some societies, a married woman’s lover, when discovered, was expected to reimburse the husband for her bride-price and take the wife as his own. If the lover refused, homicide and war were the common outcome. Among some New Guinea tribes, divorce and adultery were the most usual occasions for war, and violence could erupt even at wedding ceremonies because the bride’s family found fault with the bride-price collected. Mistreatment or killing of a wife might be avenged by the wife’s brothers or male kinsman, actions that could start a spiral of revenge killings and escalation that ended in wholesale war. Intermarriage is thus no guarantee of peace; like trade, it can be an inducement to war.

  The interchangeable character of exchange and war becomes clearer when we consider their ultimate physical results. Trade, intermarriage, and war all have the effect of moving goods and people between social units. In warfare, goods move as plunder, and
people (especially women) move as captives. In exchange and intermarriage, goods move as reciprocal gifts, trade items, and bride wealth, whereas people move as spouses. In effect, the same desirable acquisitions are thus attained by alternative (but not mutually exclusive) means. If raiding and trading are two sides of the same coin, the goods and people acquired must be the coin itself.

  The fact that exchange and war can have precisely the same results is often forgotten by archaeologists. When exotic goods are found at a site, they are almost invariably interpreted as being evidence of prehistoric exchange. That such items might be the spoils of war seldom occurs to prehistorians, who immediately proceed to plot “trade routes” and try to reconstruct the mechanisms of exchange. For high-volume exotic items with an everday use, like pottery or flakeable stone (for example, obsidian or flint) for tools, these assumptions are probably usually correct. But for rarer items, especially those that might have prestige value, or the bones of domestic livestock, archaeologists should at least consider the possibility that they represent plunder. In fact, archaeologists studying exchange between the Norse and the Inuit in Greenland and Canada have noted a peculiar imbalance in the evidence: finds of Norse goods at Thule Inuit sites are common, whereas finds of Inuit items at Norse sites are extremely rare. Since some of the Norse artifacts discovered at Thule settlements have been “precious items—ones not likely to have been traded” (for example, a bronze balance arm and chain-mail armor) by the metal-impoverished Greenland Norse—some scholars suspect that the Inuit plundered rather than traded for some of these goods.29 It is also useful to recall that livestock-stealing raids were at least as important a method for acquiring horses (among the historic Plains tribes) and cattle (among many East African tribes) as any form of exchange.30 Thus archaeologists doubly pacify the past by assuming that all exotic items are evidence of exchange and that exchange precludes war. The ethnographic evidence implies that both of these assumptions are invalid: war moves goods and people just as effectively (albeit sometimes in only one direction) as exchange, and exchange can easily incite warfare.

  To varying degrees, then, many societies tend to fight the people they marry and to marry those they fight, to raid the people with whom they trade and to trade with their enemies. Contrary to the usual assumptions, exchange between societies is a context favorable to conflict and is closely associated with it.

  NINE

  Bad Neighborhoods

  The Contexts for War

  We have observed that increasing human density does not promote warfare and that increased trade and intermarriage do not inhibit it. What conditions (if any) promote or intensify conflict? As noted in Chapter 8, the most common “reasons” given for wars have been retaliation for acts of violence—that is, revenge and defense—and various economic motives. If this generalization is accurate, one might expect warfare to be more frequent in situations involving at least one especially belligerent party, severe economic difficulties, and a lack of shared institutions for resolving disputes or common values emphasizing nonviolence. These conditions are found in the “bad neighborhoods” that are created by proximity to a bellicose neighbor, during hard times, and along frontiers.

  “ROTTEN APPLES” AND RAIDING CLUSTERS

  In his statistical study of the Indians of western North America, Joseph Jorgensen noticed that raiding activity was clustered rather than uniformly distributed.1 Warfare was more intense in certain regions than in others, apparently because of the presence of a few very aggressive societies that frequently mounted offensive raids. The tribes that were the foci of these raiding clusters were those of the northern Pacific Northwest Coast, the Klamath-Modoc of the southernmost Plateau, the Thompson tribe of the northernmost Plateau, the Navajo-Apaches of the Southwest, and the Mohave-Yuma of the Lower Colorado River. These groups frequently raided not only their immediate neighbors, but also much more distant tribes. Records indicate that the Tlingit from Alaska’s panhandle raided as far south as Puget Sound, and the Mohave attacked groups on the coast of California. The booty acquired by these inveterate raiders varied widely: slaves on the Pacific Northwest Coast and for the Klamath-Modoc; food and portable goods for the Apaches, Thompsons, and Mohave; territory on the Northwest Coast and the Lower Colorado. Other especially bellicose groups in North America included the Iroquois, the Sioux of the northern Plains, and the Comanche of the southern Plains. During the historic period, the Iroquois raided as far afield as Delaware, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi Valley. South American and Old World examples include the Tupinamba of Brazil, the Caribs of the Guianas, the Yanomamo of Venezuela and Brazil, some Nguni Bantu tribes (such as the Mtetwa-Zulu) in southeastern Africa, the Nuer of the Sudan, the Masai of East Africa, and the Foré and Telefolmin of New Guinea. The aggressive societies at the heart of these raiding clusters were rotten apples that spoiled their regional barrels.

  An analogous pattern is recognizable in Western history—various peoples and nations that were especially belligerent for several generations. The list of such Western rotten apples could include republican Rome, Late Classical Germany, medieval (Viking) Scandinavia, sixteenth-century Spain, seventeenth-century France, revolutionary-Napoleonic France. During the nineteenth century, Canada, Mexico, and most Indian tribes west of the Appalachians had war-related reasons to regret that they were, in the words of a Mexican president, “so far from God, so near the United States.” Certainly the twentieth century would have been far less bloodstained if Germany and Japan had been less quarrelsome and covetous societies.

  Evidently, then, one factor intensifying warfare is an aggressive neighbor. Most societies that are frequently attacked not only fight to defend themselves, but also retaliate with attacks of their own, thus multiplying the amount of combat they engage in. Less aggressive societies, stimulated by more warlike groups in their vicinity, become more bellicose themselves, devote more attention to military matters, and may institutionalize some aspects of war making. The military sodalities or clubs of the Pueblo tribes of the American Southwest seem to have been an institutional response to Apache-Navajo aggressiveness since they declined in importance and membership (and in some tribes disappeared altogether) after the Apacheans were pacified by the Americans. With their long experience in defending against raids, the “peaceful” Pueblos were anything but peaceable. The Spaniards found them to be tough opponents initially and valorous and effective allies later in fighting with the nomadic tribes.2

  Why some societies are more inclined than others to assume the offensive is both an anthropological and a historical puzzle. In most (but not all) of the cases mentioned earlier, the aggressive groups acquired territory at the expense of more passive ones. But whether the desire for more territory causes aggressiveness or whether expansion is merely an effect of bellicosity remains a contentious subject among scholars. Many expansionist nation-states experienced a higher rate of population growth than their less warlike neighbors.3 In some tribal cases, such growth was partially due to the practice of incorporating captive women and children into the tribe, as in the case of the Sudanese Nuer.4 Nevertheless, aggressive American Indian groups should have been experiencing population declines from introduced diseases during the early historical period. Although tribal population figures are usually little more than educated guesses, it often appears that these more bellicose groups either were being less rapidly decimated than their immediate neighbors or may even have had a period of increasing population during their offensive heyday.5 For example, the estimated population of the aggressive Mohave was 3,000 in the 1770s but 4,000 in 1872—the dates that demarcate the period of their most intense raiding activity and territorial expansion. During the same period, the population of one of the Mohave’s favorite enemies, the Maricopa, declined from 3,000 to 400, primarily because of disease.

  Rapid population increases can create population pressure by increasing demand in the economy and stressing the capacity of social institutions. For instance, having greater
numbers of young men and women in the society requires having larger amounts of valuable commodities available to pay bride-prices or dowries. In societies where the number of achieved (that is, not inherited) leadership or high-status roles is limited, a population boom will lead to more competition for these few positions. Since these are often achieved on the basis of wealth and/or military prowess, the resulting internal competition will encourage more raiding and plundering of other social groups. For example, each new age-grade among several East African tribes could advance in seniority, toward marriage and “elderhood,” only by raiding other tribes.6 This kind of population pressure can occur at any population density, since it is the product of relative growth and not absolute numbers or density. Population increase not only encourages aggression, but also provides a larger manpower pool to absorb the losses that more frequent combat entails and allows formation of larger war parties that are more likely to be successful.

  Another relatively common factor in such cases—and one that often accompanies population growth—is the development or introduction of new technology in food production, transportation, and weaponry. The relationship between maritime technology and European expansion is obvious. The introduction of the Old World horse had similar effects on the demography and militancy of many Indian tribes in North and South America. Likewise, the development of a special assegai (sword-spear) and some tactical innovations related to its use were instrumental in the Zulu expansion.7 Although these correlations remain controversial, the relationship between the diffusion of iron technology and the Bantu expansion in Africa, or between horse riding and the spread of the Indo-Europeans in Eurasia, may be prehistoric examples of this phenomenon. Perhaps a rapid population increase provides the push and new technology the pull in making some groups more aggressive. But whatever the reason—land hunger, rapid population increases, or new technology—some societies are more aggressive than others and radiate intensified warfare within their immediate vicinity.