War Before Civilization

by Lawrence H Keeley

  Of course, raiding clusters and the bellicose societies at the heart of them do not endure forever. The hyperaggressive Norsemen have become the pacific Scandinavians. Except for a small class of samurai who used only edged weapons, Japan had been a peaceful, demilitarized nation for almost 250 years before Commodore Perry released its combative genie from its self-imposed bottle. Two generations later, its bellicosity was extreme. But two generations after 1945, Japan is again demilitarized and has one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the world. Within a few generations, the fearsome Iroquois became peaceable yeoman farmers. After a traumatic defeat and temporary exile from their homeland in the 1860s, the Navaho quickly made the transition from rapacious raiders to peaceful pastoralists; the Navaho have since become world renowned for their rugs and silverwork. In time, then, aggressive groups may be pacified by defeat at the hands of equally aggressive but larger societies, or by the loss of their technological advantage when their adversaries also acquire them. Even in the absence of defeat, the zeal of expansionist societies tends to abate as they begin experiencing the diminishing returns of overextension or succumb to the attractions of consolidation and exploitation. Military ferocity is not a fixed quality of any race or culture, but a temporary condition that usually bears the seeds of it own destruction.

  FRONTIERS

  Some recent anthropological work argues that frontiers between different cultural groups, economic types, or ethnic stocks are among the most peaceful places on earth.8 Rather than constituting zones of tension and competition between different systems, such boundary regions (according to these accounts)are “open social systems” where the exchange of goods, labor, spouses, and information between two social realms is the order of the day. Implicitly, the anthropologists responsible for this interpretation seem to assume that these mutually beneficial exchanges discourage conflict and prevent war. The only exceptions allowed in this idyllic picture relate to frontiers shared with civilized Europeans. All other frontiers—whether static or moving, whether between cultures or language groups, whether between farmers and foragers or nomads and villagers—are represented as realms of exchange and cooperation.

  Certainly, these scholars are correct in noting that even the sharpest boundaries between major cultural units seldom represent solid walls; rather, they resemble permeable tissues through which considerable exchange occurs. But due to three oversights, many anthropologists are excessively optimistic about the peacefulness of such places.

  The first problem, discussed in Chapter 8, is that exchange is an inducement to or source of war and not a bulwark against it. Precisely because frontiers display things that people need or want (such as land, labor, spouses, and various commodities) just beyond the limits of their own social unit and beyond easy acquisition by the methods normal within their own society (such as sharing, balanced reciprocity, and redistribution by leaders), the temptation to gain Them by warfare is especially strong in these regions.

  The second problem for the concept of peaceful frontiers is the fact that these regions necessarily lack the very social and cultural features that prevent disputes from turning violent. Independent societies have no overarching institutions of intersocietal mediation such as headmen, councils, and chiefs. Nor are there shared cultural values emphasizing group solidarity that treat bloodshed among fellow tribesmen or countrymen as especially horrifying and super-naturally disturbing. For example, God’s Sixth Commandment to the Israelites applied only to themselves, as their later treatment of the Canaanites demonstrated. Indeed, the Sixth Commandment is more honestly and precisely translated into English in the modern Jewish Torah as “Thou shall not murder,” since murder is the killing of a countryman, not the slaying of a foreigner in war. The social-solidarity values that oppose “us” to “them” help foment the collective violence of war from disputes between individuals of different societies. For this reason, much of the “information” exchanged across social boundaries and frontiers may be acrimonious and include uncomplimentary ethnic epithets (for example, “Filthy-Lodge People,” “Nit-heads” “Grey Feces,” “Spittle,” “Bastards,” “Ferocious Rats,” or the common and unambiguous “Enemies”).9 It is not just in movie Westerns that frontiers are regions of cultural antagonism where the legal and cultural constraints on violence are lax.

  Finally, frontier areas tend to be less peaceful than the interiors of social and cultural domains because they are the most exposed to raids, the first to feel the effects of enemy depredations, and the most inclined to retaliate. Because they are usually less densely settled, easier to surprise, and easier to retreat from if resistance proves too great, border regions attract raids. The greater vulnerability and volatility of frontiers explain why they have often been buffered by no-man’s-lands and why their settlements have often been protected by fortifications.

  There are three major kinds of cultural frontiers: civilized-tribal; pastoral nomad-village farmer; and farmer-forager. Because civilizations produce written records, the first type of frontier has been the object of some comparative studies.10 These comparisons indicate that although warfare between civilized and tribal peoples is not inevitable (as some examples prove), it has almost invariably occurred when a frontier involving a settlement or political control has moved. Very few pastoralist-farmer frontiers have been described that were not also part of primitive-civilized boundaries or from which warfare had been eliminated by the power of a state. And such frontiers seem to have been especially tense, even after pacification. Certainly, the few unpacified herder-farmer frontiers described ethnographically—for example, that between the aggressive Masai herdsmen of East Africa and their settled Bantu neighbors—appear to have been plagued by raiding and warfare.11 Because farmer-forager interactions have been the focus of considerable archaeological discussion, the ethnography and ethnohistory of such frontiers can be used to test the peaceful-frontier concept.

  Anthropologists who consider uncivilized farmer-forager frontiers peaceful invariably use as examples the relationships commonly found between certain tropical-forest hunting peoples and their village farmer neighbors—especially the relationship between Pygmy hunters and Bantu (or other Negro) farmers in central Africa. But using this well-known example first of all requires discounting the Bantu’s claim that the Pygmies are actually their dependent subjects, literally serfs or “servants.”12 It also means overlooking the implications of the Pygmies’ occasional resort to crop theft when their Bantu “masters” are not forthcoming enough. Recent evidence on the diet of Pygmies indicates that they could not survive in the tropical forest without recourse to the substantial amounts of food (approximately 65 percent of their calories) they obtain from the agriculturalists.13 This dependency is further evidenced by the fact that no Pygmy groups speak their own language but only those of their Negro patrons. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Pygmies remain at peace and socially subordinate to the Bantu; to do otherwise would result either in starvation or in destruction at the hands of the more numerous Bantu. Most, if not all, supposedly benign farmer-forager relations in the tropical forests are predicated on a similar dietary dependence of the foragers and on the social subordination that follows from it.14

  Any ethnographic evidence of frequent hostilities between farmers and foragers outside the tropical forests is dismissed by peaceful-frontier advocates as being a product of the disruptions that resulted from colonization by civilized peoples. This dismissal, like others of its ilk, is difficult to refute since all evidence of the hostilities comes from the supposed disrupters.

  Yet it is difficult to dismiss the indications of frontier hostilities between the hunter-gatherers of southern Africa and their pastoral or farming neighbors.15 The pastoral Khoikhoi (Hottentots) of the Cape region of South Africa at first contact were already fighting with the San (Bushmen) hunter-gatherers, who were raiding their livestock. Initially, the Khoikhoi welcomed Europeans as allies in this struggle. The precontact provena
nce of these Khoikhoi-San hostilities is attested by rock paintings left by the San and by the derogatory Khoikhoi term San, which means something like “no-account rascal.” Moreover, when the Kalahari San of Botswana encountered expanding Bantu Tswana herders, the oral histories of both sides show that fighting and mutual raiding occurred. The Tswana term for the San was Masarwa, the Ma- prefix designating an enemy tribe (now softened by the Botswana government to Basarwa, using the Ba-prefix signifying friendly Bantu tribes). San hunter-gatherers in southeastern Africa fought with the neighboring Nguni Bantu tribes—again because of stock raiding. These San-Nguni conflicts are recorded in prehistoric San rock paintings (Figure 9.1) showing small-statured bowmen without shields (San) fighting large-statured warriors bearing shields, spears, and knobkerries (Nguni). In one early recorded incident, a Xhosa (Bantu) chief ordered his warriors to exterminate the local San because they had killed his favorite ox. In wars fought between rival Bantu tribes or clans, women and children were usually spared; but in raids on stock-stealing San bands, often all were slaughtered, without regard to sex or age. San bows and poisoned arrows fared very well in combat against Bantu shields, clubs, and spears, however, so extermination was not easy to accomplish. As a result, a certain balance of power was often established, especially in settings where rugged country gave the elusive San tactical advantages. In mountainous Lesotho, relations between the Sotho Bantu and the San were supposedly amiable until Sotho hunting with guns made game scarce and San stock raiding created conflicts. In all these cases, the dynamic behind this farmer-forager warfare was the same: Khoikhoi or Bantu retaliation for San livestock raiding, which itself was often predicated on or exacerbated by game shortages created by the hunting of the farmer-herders and by the ecological transformations induced by tillage and grazing. This hostile dynamic was finally transformed when the better-armed and horse-mounted Boers arrived on the scene. They, like the Nguni and Khoikhoi, found that The San were difficult to subdue because of their poisoned arrows and the mobility of their small bands. Indeed, the hostility of the San in the Sneeuwburg Mountains halted the expansion of the Trekboers in the northeastern Cape for thirty years and even forced the frontier back in some areas. In the end, though, when the Boers became numerous enough, their commandos (militia) simply exterminated the San.

  Figure 9.1 Prehistoric rock painting showing battle between San foragers on the left and Bantu farmers on the right. The San are armed only with bows, whereas the Bantu carry oxhide shields and spears (held in reserve behind the shield) and wield knobkerries (a wooden club that could be thrown). The tadpole shapes around the San bowmen may represent thrown knobkerries. (Redrawn from Wilson and Thompson 1983)

  In none of these cases were hostilities incessant, even after Europeans appeared on the scene; in fact, there is plentiful evidence of trade, intermarriage, and the incorporation of individual San as “clients” or serfs by the Khoikhoi and Bantu tribes. However, being the clients of one Khoikhoi tribe did not prevent San bands from raiding other Khoikhoi groups, so clientship did not necessarily eliminate farmer-forager hostilities.

  In recent descriptions of these patron-client relationships between farmer-herders and foragers by historians and anthropologists, the arrangement is depicted as benign, voluntary, and mutually beneficial. But a description of San clientship by a Bantu Tswana chief has a very different tenor:

  The Masarwa [that is, the San] are slaves. They can be killed. It is no crime. They are like cattle. If they run away, their masters can bring them back and do what they like in the way of punishment. They are never paid. If the Masarwa live in the veld, and I want any to work for me, I go out and take any I want.16

  This quotation raises questions about another dynamic recognized by advocates of peaceful frontiers. Proponents of this theory argue that farmers and herders on thinly settled frontiers often experience labor shortages that can be intense at certain seasons (such as during the harvest) and that it was convenient for them to enlist the temporary help of the local foragers in exchange for surplus food. The Tswana chiefs description implies that it can be just as convenient for the more numerous farmers to conscript foragers by force, keep them as involuntary servants, and “pay” them bare subsistence. For the farmers, this version of farmer-forager symbiosis has the additional advantage of simultaneously eliminating potential stock rustlers and crop thieves. In an account of the first contact between his tribe and the !Kung San, a Tswana claimed that the San accepted a servile status out of fear of the Tswana and that, had these San resisted, the Tswana “would have slaughtered them.”17

  But the San were not the only hunter-gatherers to harass village farmers, nor was stock theft the only torment raiders inflicted. Both foragers and pastoralists showed a propensity for stealing crops as well as livestock from settled farmers (although, when there was a choice, livestock seems to have been the preferred booty, probably because it can be taken away under its own power).18 Such thefts, however, were seldom accomplished without combat or inciting retaliatory raids. One old story among the Navajo is that the first time they ever heard this name applied to them (they call themselves Diné, or “people”) was when one band was robbing a Tewa Pueblo cornfield; the victims shouted “Navaho” when the thieves were discovered. Among the Western Apaches of Arizona, when the meat supply of a band began to run low, an older woman would complain publicly and suggest that a raid be mounted to obtain a fresh supply. The band leader would then call for volunteers, and a small party of no more than fifteen warriors would set off for an enemy settlement. Moving as unobtrusively as possible, they would attempt to drive off some of the enemy’s herds and then beat a very rapid retreat back home. The party would fight if it was caught, but it tried to avoid any contact; the object was simply to obtain food, not to inflict damage. If any raiders were killed or the victims retaliated by killing a band member, a much larger war party—up to 200 warriors—would depart, surround the offending settlement, and kill as many of its inhabitants as possible. Similarly, the Mura of central Brazil preferred to raid neighboring sedentary farmers for manioc and other crops rather than cultivate these themselves. Since pastoral and foraging groups were usually highly mobile and had such large territories to hide in, they were very difficult to catch, either to reclaim lost goods or to exact retribution. To note that foraging or pastoral nomads made exasperating adversaries for settled farmers is an understatement; to claim that They were almost never enemies is wishful thinking.

  While static frontiers were often hostile, moving ones presented an even greater potential for violent conflicts, since they added further explosives to an already volatile mix. A moving cultural boundary meant that one human physical type, language, culture, or economic system was expanding at the expense of another. Of course, such spreads were sometimes accomplished through the , peaceful mechanisms of intermarriage, willing adoption of novelties, and voluntary annexation. But people tend to be attached to their traditional way of life, territory, and political independence and are seldom completely defenseless; consequently, warfare often accompanies the movement of a frontier and occasionally may be the only mechanism by which it can advance. When the movement of a frontier involves colonization by newcomers on a large scale, conditions favoring warfare reach their peak. The newcomers are at least intruding, if not trespassing; often compete with the natives for land, water, game, firewood, and other limited materials; commonly change the local ecology; are inclined to be cavalier about the property rights of the other but are fastidious about their own; and exhibit inscrutably odd customs and tastes. It is seldom long before the colonists’ behavior convinces the aborigines that the newcomers should be encouraged to be “new” someplace else. This type of moving colonist frontier is documented historically only for literate civilizations; all others are the province of archaeologists and are subject to the vagaries of their interpretive fashions. The advance and retreat of most (but not all) of these civilized settler frontiers have been accompanied by frequent warf
are, as between the Romans and the Celts or Germans in western Europe, the late medieval Spanish and the Gaunche tribesmen of the Canary Islands, the medieval Japanese and Ainu tribesmen on Honshū, the modern Japanese and the Taiwanese Aborigines, and the modern Europeans and almost everyone else.19

  Comparable prehistoric frontiers do give evidence that violence was common or at least expected.20 The conflicts already in existence at the dawn of historical records between the Khoikhoi or Bantu and the San in southern Africa and between the Navaho—Apache and the Pueblos in the American Southwest have already been mentioned. In eastern North America, the intrusion of Mississippian peoples into various regions between A.D. 900 and 1400 was marked by the fortification of almost all new settlements in these areas. The retreat of these Mississippians from northeastern Illinois in the face of the expansion of Oneota settlements was marked by a high level of violent death and fortified villages. A concentration of fortified settlements and The horrific Crow Creek massacre occurred on or near a fluctuating frontier between Middle Missouri (proto-Mandan) and Coalescent (proto-Arikara) farmers between A.D. 1300 and 1500. The abandonment of some areas in northwestern New Mexico by Anasazi farmers between A.D. 1050 and 1300 was immediately preceded by frequent fortification and destruction of settlements as well as other indications of violence. There is also considerable indication of violence on the periphery of the shrinking area of Hohokam occupation in Arizona during this same period. Hostile frontiers, then, are not unusual in the later prehistory of the best-studied regions of North America.