War Before Civilization

by Lawrence H Keeley

  Far earlier in western Europe, some 7,000 to 6,000 years ago, colonizing Early Neolithic farmers appear to have encountered, or expected to encounter, a hostile reception from the indigenous Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.21 The farmers of the Impressed Ware (or Cardial) culture founded settlements at favorable locations along the Mediterranean coasts and often fortified these sites with ditches. The local foragers, whose sites were less substantial and unfortified, adopted (perhaps by looting) ceramics and livestock from these settlers. At one Cardial site in southern France, archaeologists found a few skulls with cut-marks from decapitation. These skulls differed in physical type from that of the Cardial farmers, but resembled the type of Mesolithic foragers farther to the north. It therefore appears that the Cardial farmers at least occasionally killed foragers and kept their heads as trophies. The colonization of Germany and the Low Countries by farmers of the Linear Pottery culture was accompanied by fortified border villages (Figure 9.2) and, in Belgium at least, a 20- to 30-kilometer (12- to 18-mile) no-man’s-land between these defended sites and the settlements of Final Mesolithic foragers (Figure 9.3). In one of these border villages, most of the houses had been burned, after which the village was fortified. As the trophy heads at Ofnet and the mass grave at Talheim demonstrate, neither the indigenous foragers nor the invading Linear Pottery farmers were peaceful among themselves; thus it is unlikely that they treated each other less violently. Because human remains from this period and area are extremely rare (the soils did not preserve them well), no direct evidence yet exists of farmers killed with Mesolithic weapons or vice versa. Nevertheless, the fortification of pioneer and border settlements does imply that hostilities were expected on these earliest European farmer-forager frontiers. From both the Old World and the New World, evidence suggests that prehistoric frontiers, like more recent examples, were far from placid.

  Figure 9.2 Distribution of LBK or Linear Pottery (Early Neolithic) enclosures relative to the limits of LBK expansion at two stages. The frontier distribution of the Most Ancient enclosures is very clear, while the pattern for the Early and Late periods is less clear because two periods are combined. (Hockmann 1990; drawn by Ray Brod, Department of Geography, University of Illinois at Chicago)

  HARD TIMES

  In a recent cross-cultural study of the circumstances surrounding preindustrial warfare, Carol and Melvin Ember noted that the nonindustrial societies most frequently embroiled in warfare were those that “have had a history of expectable but unpredictable disasters” (droughts, floods, insect infestations, and so on).22 These disasters do not include anticipatable chronic food shortages, such as the “hungry season” endured by many hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers in higher latitudes during the late winter and early spring. The clear implication is that the most war-prone groups go to war to recoup losses due to natural calamities, to replace deteriorating pastures and fields by means of territorial expansion, and to cushion the effects of expected future losses.

  Figure 9.3 Distribution of LBK or Linear Pottery farming settlements versus Final Mesolithic foragers campsites, ca. 5000 B.C., in northeastern Belgium. Notice the no-man’s-land to the north where no major geographical barrier (such as the deep valley of the Meuse) intervenes. (Redrawn after Keeley and Cahen 1989 by Ray Brod, Department of Geography, University of Illinois at Chicago)

  Droughts figure frequently in examples of disaster-driven warfare.23 The various nomadic raiders who preyed on the Pueblos of the American Southwest were especially active during dry years. As noted earlier, the Hopi anticipated trading rather than raiding from approaching Apaches only if (rare) rain clouds were visible in the direction from which the Apaches were approaching. Offensive raiding by the Maricopa of Arizona was associated with low-water stages on the Colorado and Gila rivers. A similar correlation with dry spells is attested for the raids of Libyan and Asiatic Bedouin pastoralists on the Faiyum and Nile Delta frontiers of ancient Egypt. The increase in fighting among South African Bantu tribes in the early nineteenth century seems to have resulted in part from years of decreasing rainfall following forty years of better conditions during which both human and cattle populations had increased. The coincident emergence and expansion of the Zulu state under such overcrowded conditions set off a confused and sanguinary period of forced migrations by marauding bands of refugees known as the Mfecane. A similarly bellicose time of troubles, accompanied by political consolidation, apparently occurred in parts of the American Southwest during a long drought in the twelfth century.24 It is hardly surprising that—seeing their crops wither, their herds dwindle, and their families go hungry—men would fight to obtain means of subsistence from someone else. During the warfare and attendant suffering of the Bantu Mfecane and various prehistoric southwestern droughts, some desperate people were apparently even driven to cannibalism.25

  In fact, it is becoming increasingly certain that many prehistoric cases of intensive warfare in various regions corresponded with hard times created by ecological and climatic changes.26 The extreme violence noted in South Dakota just after A.D. 1300 follows a late-thirteenth-century climate change that caused the migration of Coalescent farmers from the west-central Plains into the region occupied by Middle Missouri villagers. The bones of the slaughtered Coalescent villagers at Crow Creek bore evidence that the villagers had been ill-nourished for a prolonged period before their deaths. Judging from the proportion of skeletons with embedded projectile points, the most violent periods in the later prehistory of the Santa Barbara Channel region in California are related to “warm-water events” that disrupted the productivity of coastal waters and caused widespread dietary deficiencies. Certain pathologies (such as ricketts) possibly related to inadequate diet were also common in the Late Paleolithic Qadan cemeteries, including the often-mentioned one at Gebel Sahaba.

  No type of economy or social organization is immune to natural disasters or to the impetus they give to warfare; foragers, farmers, bands, and states all can suffer them. Because of their smaller territories, slimmer subsistence margins, and more limited transportation systems, however, smaller-scale societies are more susceptible to injury from these disasters than are large states and empires. In the latter, a famine in one area can be ameliorated with supplies transported from more favored areas or taken from centralized food reserves. In a small society, the needed supplies may be too distant for practical transportation by human, animal, or canoe. Moreover, these supplements must be obtained by trade with outsiders who may not be particularly charitable, and trade itself (as we have seen) is a rich source of incitements to war. It should be said that larger, denser, and more technically sophisticated societies have a greater capacity to create their own disasters through deforestation, overgrazing, soil salinization, the introduction of new pests, and even foolish economic policies. But whatever their source, hard times create a very strong temptation for needy people to take—or try to take—what they lack from others.

  What makes disaster-driven warfare especially bitter is that the defenders, while usually somewhat better off than the attackers, commonly are suffering to some degree from the same natural adversities. In such dire circumstances, any group that yields an acre of land or a bushel of corn may risk its own survival; war does become a struggle for existence. Of course, not all wars occur under these conditions, and sometimes people are simply too weakened by famine to fight. But natural disasters are clearly predicaments that increase the frequency and intensity of war.

  TEN

  Naked, Poor, and Mangled Peace

  Its Desirability and Fragility

  The other side of the question What contexts promote war? is What conditions favor peace? Indeed, answering the first question satisfactorily is impossible without addressing the second. However, the second question is much more difficult to answer on the basis of ethnographic data, simply because genuinely peaceful societies—as we have seen—are extremely rare. Both the historical and the ethnographic records display what frustrated social anthropo
logist Thomas Gregor called a “scarcity of peace.”1 Any attempt to look for the common circumstances and cultural features that encourage peace must proceed under this rather severe constraint.

  ATTITUDES TOWARD WAR AND PEACE

  Although warfare in many (if not most) nonstate societies was extremely frequent, deadly, and destructive, little evidence indicates that its practitioners and potential victims revelled in or harbored a special affection for it. Like people in civilized societies, tribal people responded to warfare with mixed emotions and contradictory social reactions. In most nonstate societies, as in our own, prowess and effective leadership in combat were granted high status and other rewards. The costs of defeat were so high and warfare was so frequent that the brave and skilled warrior was of immense social value. But warfare, whether primitive or civilized, involves losses, suffering, and terror, even for the victors. Consequently, it was nowhere viewed as an unalloyed good, and the respect accorded to accomplished warriors was often tinged with aversion.

  For example, it was common the world over for the warrior who had just killed an enemy to be regarded by his own people as spiritually polluted or contaminated.2 He therefore had to undergo a magical cleansing to remove this pollution. Often he had to live for a time in seclusion, eat special food or fast, be excluded from participation in rituals, and abstain from sexual intercourse. Because he was a spiritual danger to himself and anyone he touched, a Huli killer of New Guinea could not use his shooting hand for several days; had to stay awake the first night after the killing, chanting spells; drink “bespelled” water; and exchange his bow for another. South American Carib warriors had to cover their heads for a month after dispatching an enemy. An African Meru warrior, after killing, had to pay a curse remover to conduct the rituals that would purge his impurity and restore him to society. A Marquesan was tabooed for ten days after a war killing. A Chilcotin of British Columbia who had killed an enemy had to live apart from the group for a time, and all returning raiders had to cleanse themselves by drinking water and vomiting. These and similar rituals emphasize the extent to which homicide was deemed abnormal, even when committed against enemies.

  Furthermore, even the most bellicose societies did not award their best warriors or captains their highest positions of status or leadership.3 Instead, these rewards were reserved for men who, although they were often expected to be brave and skilled in war, were more proficient in the arts of peace—oratory, wealth acquisition, generosity, negotiation, and ritual knowledge. The six desired characteristics of a western Apache headman, for instance, were industriousness, generosity, impartiality, forbearance, conscientiousness, and eloquence; not one of these pertains directly to warfare. Cheyenne “peace chiefs” had more political influence, material wealth, and wives than the chiefs who led war parties. Among the militarily sophisticated and war-torn tribes of the Pacific Northwest Coast, chiefs and high-ranking males owed their status to inheritance and wealth, not to military prowess. The “Big Men” of highland New Guinea were seldom renowned warriors; rather, they were wealthy, generous, and persuasive. Among the Mae Enga, it was recognized that “rubbish men”—those with the least wealth and the lowest status—were often the most effective warriors. Civilized soldiers have often observed, with Kipling, that they are treated as saviors “when the guns begin to shoot” but are received with much less enthusiasm (and even with distaste) in peacetime. Evidently, tribal warriors were often regarded with similar reserve.

  While men could acquire the spoils of victory or, even in defeat, the enhanced status of a warrior, women’s share from warfare was mostly negative. Even if they and their children were less likely to suffer physical harm than adult males, women had a great deal more to lose and less opportunity to gain. The gardens they tended and the food stores they produced could be looted or destroyed, and their homes razed. The threat of capture, rape, and exile loomed if the men were defeated. In short, they shared many of the risks but few of the benefits of war. It is therefore not surprising to discover that in many societies women detested war. Representing the unanimous opinion of her sex in a society where land disputes were the most common cause of fighting, one Mae Enga woman protested, “Men are killed but the land remains. The land is there in its own right and it does not command people to fight for it.”4 Such feminine antipathy toward for war was neither universal nor eternal, however. The taunts of women often incited men to fight; women took an active role in the torture of captives, as among the Tupi and Carib of South America; and in a few cases, women participated in actual combat (Chapter 2). But in the more commonly encountered situation, where their opinions on political matters were discounted or ignored and where their expected role was to suffer in silence, women usually viewed warfare as an unredeemed evil.

  At some level, even the most militant warriors recognized the evils of war and the desirability of peace.5 Thus certain New Guinea Jalemo warriors, who praised and bragged about military feats and who took great pleasure in eating both the pigs and the corpses of vanquished enemies, readily confessed that war was a bad thing that depleted pig herds, incurred burdensome debts, and restricted trade and travel. Similarly, despite their frequent resort to it, Kapauku Papuans seem to hate war. As one man put it:

  War is bad and nobody likes it. Sweet potatoes disappear, pigs disappear, fields deteriorate, and many relatives and friends get killed. But one cannot help it. A man starts a fight and no matter how much one depises him, one has to go and help because he is one’s relative and one feels sorry for him.

  In small-scale societies, it is usually a matter of “my relatives, right or wrong” rather than “my country.”

  Even the fierce head-hunting Jivaro of South America regarded their incessant warfare as a curse. Additional evidence of the universal preference for peace is the ease and even gratitude with which some of the most warlike of tribal peoples accepted colonial pacification or, in The new conditions wrought by European contact, pacified themselves.6 For example, Auyana men in New Guinea declared that life was much better after pacification because now one could go out to urinate in the morning without fear of ambush and one could eat a meal without anxiety about raids. Whether one takes any of these protestations at face value or cynically, they are remarkably like the attitudes and platitudes expressed by civilized people, both military and civilian.

  In a rare ethnographic mention of psychological reactions to combat, some New Guinean Auyana warriors with reputations for bravery—actually all who were asked—admitted to suffering nightmares about becoming isolated in combat. A somewhat comparable nightmare about engaging in solitary combat against a raiding party of spirits and being trapped was recorded from a New Guinea Tauade man.7 Almost identical nightmares involving being left behind or otherwise separated from one’s comrades and being surrounded or trapped by enemies have been a common symptom of “combat neurosis” or “delayed stress syndrome” among American combat veterans.8 These examples provide tantalizing evidence that the fear and gore of combat are traumatic regardless of the cultural value placed on military prowess and that primitive combat is every bit as stressful and terrible as modern warfare.

  On Tahiti, where warfare was especially brutal and merciless, “exhorters,” called Rauti, circulated constantly among the warriors during combat, urging the latter to spare no enemy—even relative or friend—and to display the ferocity of “the devouring wild dog.” When they were being browbeaten into doing something, Tahitian men would murmur, “This is equal to a Rauti.”9 This custom strongly implies that even when enemy atrocities to avenge were plentiful and where warfare was customarily exceptionally cruel, men had to be persistently nagged into committing acts of inhumanity.

  Ethnographers have seldom asked individuals—men or women—about their attitudes toward and reactions to war, but the few available examples show that personal reactions in tribal societies varied as much as they do among civilized folk and that few people regarded war as more than a necessary evil. It was redeeme
d only by the opportunity it afforded for the display of courage and by the prospect of the profits of victory. In other words, tribal peoples were much like ourselves.

  To judge from their mythologies, most cultural groups have invented many stories to account for the origins of warfare or for the warlike nature of aggressive neighbors, but they have created very few devoted to the genesis of peace. Although this seeming lack may be a consequence of the inadequate questions asked by ethnographers, it may also reflect a sense that war needs excuses (in the form of grievances, causes, mythological prescriptions by gods and ancestors, and so on), whereas peace requires none. From a similar survey, Harry Turney-High concludes that war and the killing it entails put men in a situation that they find at least uncomfortable and that peace is preferred “even in the minds of the most warlike peoples.”10 The clear implication is that peace is unexceptional, normal, and desirable to humans everywhere; and war is not.

  Given that war is universally condemned and peace is everywhere preferred, it is very difficult to argue that values and attitudes play any significant role in promoting peace or war. As we have seen, even the most bellicose societies appear to regard their military heroes with mixed feelings—honoring their deeds but treating them in the short term as spiritually contaminated and denying them in the long term the highest rewards of wealth and status. Evidence also suggests that combat is just as psychologically traumatic for tribal warriors as for their civilized counterparts. People universally recognize that even for victors the practical effects of warfare are extremely unpleasant. It seems impossible that attitudes that are so widespread, realistic, and rational, that reflect direct experience and self-interest, are insincere or merely abstract. Yet if this worldwide revulsion had any real impact on social behavior, wars should be rare and peace common; instead the opposite is true.