War Before Civilization

by Lawrence H Keeley

  Leaving the muddy waters of immediate motives and causes, a broader consideration of contexts that encourage war leads to several interesting conclusions. Contrary to common sense, neither the intensity nor the frequency of war or other violent behavior is correlated with human population density. Another surprise is that trade and intermarriage between societies increase, rather than decrease, the likelihood of war between them. On the other hand, some common expectations are correct. For example, regions and periods of frequent bitter warfare are often centered on especially aggressive societies that “spoil their neighborhood.” In several ethnographic and historical cases, these “bad apples” were experiencing rapid population increases. Consistent with Hollywood folklore, frontiers between cultures are prone to violence, especially when moving. And, as we might think, wars are very frequent during the hard times created by natural and man-made disasters.

  Despite a universal preference for peace and revulsion for homicide, even that of enemies, making peace between equals is fraught with pitfalls. Maintaining a peace between independent societies over several generations is even more difficult and thus even rarer. The rarity in both the primitive and civilized worlds of sustained peaces makes it hard to isolate the favorable factors. However, two have long appeared to be useful: employing strong institutions to resolve disputes and punish peace breaking and ensuring that those who keep the peace are rewarded, or at least not punished. If these prescriptions seem vague and too simplistic, the reason is that one cannot describe the form of institutions or the kinds of rewards that might be universally and eternally applicable. If it were not so difficult to design social systems that delivered these desiderata, peace would be a far less scarse commodity.

  But before developing too militant a view of human existence, let us put war in its place. However frequent, dramatic, and eye-catching, war remains a lesser part of social life. Whether one takes a purely behavioral view of human life or imagines that one can divine mental events, there can be no dispute that peaceful activities, arts, and ideas are by far more crucial and more common even in the most bellicose societies. Even when the most violent scenes are unfolding on some battlefield or raided village, all around the arena of combat, often at no great distance, children are being conceived and born, crops and herds attended, fish caught, animals hunted, meals prepared, tools made or mended, and thousands of other prosaic, peaceful activities pursued that are necessary to sustain life or serve other human needs. No society can sustain itself purely on the proceeds of war; even pirates and brigands must trade their booty with more peaceful folk or subordinate some of the latter as tributaries to survive. War is impossible without the food, clothing, weapons, or other devices, and, of course, combatants produced by peaceful activities. If warfare did actually absorb most of the energies and time of human beings, wars would truly, in the words of the Forty-sixth Psalm, “cease in all the world” with the rapid extinction of our species. Humans cannot photosynthesize or passively absorb nutrients from the elements; we lack the broad grinding teeth of herbivores or the sharp claws and teeth of a predator; we are relatively slow-footed and weakly muscled; we cannot gestate and nurse more than a single child each year and must continue to care for those we do birth over the many years they take to reach self-sufficiency. To be distracted for a sustained period by warfare (or the tense expectation of it) from the intricate labors and countless mental exertions required to feed, shelter, and reproduce ourselves would soon be fatal to individuals and populations. If Rousseau’s primitive golden age is imaginary, Hobbes’s perpetual donnybrook is impossible.

  While peace (that is, the absence of combat or any immediate prospect of it) may be essential to human existence, warfare is far from insignificant or absent except under civilized conditions. In a few hours, warfare can expend or destroy resources and constructions that are the products of months of labor, and it kills persons who represent years of care by their families (in Kipling’s phrase, “two thousand pounds of education drops to a ten rupee jezail” [Afghan musket]). The attrition caused by raids and battles undertaken a few days a month but sustained over time, or just a single climactic massacre, can displace, disperse, or even exterminate whole social units. As we have seen, these dire effects of waraffect all levels of social organization and were having an impact long before civilization appeared. War may not be necessary to human existence, but it is a very important aspect of that existence because its effects are so momentous and its occurrence is so frequent.

  The myth making about primitive warfare resulting from the current Western attitude of self-reproach is, of course, censurable on scholarly and scientific grounds. But it also deplorable on practical and moral grounds. The ever-immediate problem of how all of humanity can, in Lincoln’s immortal words, “achieve and cherish a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations” is not likely to be solved while we are in the thrall of nostalgic delusions. The doctrines of the pacified past unequivocally imply that the only answer to the “mighty scourge of war” is a return to tribal conditions and the destruction of all civilization. But since the primitive and prehistoric worlds were, in fact, quite violent, it seems that the only practical prospect for universal peace must be more civilization, not less. Adherence to the doctrines of the pacified past absolve us from considering the difficult question of what a truly global civilization should consist of and, more importantly, what its political structure should be.

  Depictions of precivilized humans as saints and civilized folks as demons are as hypocritical as they are erroneous. Rousseau never left his very civilized circumstances to join tribesmen living in his ideal state—for example, the hunting-gathering bands of Tasmania. Similarly, the modern-day primitive nostalgist listens to tribal music celebrating the sacredness of nature on a stereo composed of completely artificial materials ultimately extracted from strip mines and oil wells on territories seized or extorted from tribal societies. If Westerners have belatedly recognized that they are not the crown of creation and rightful lords of the earth, their now common view of themselves as humanity’s nadir is equally absurd. What is morally wrong with longer life; lower infant mortality; wider knowledge of the universe (including a science of ecology); water and food cleansed of parasites and pathogens; photography; Western literature, art, and music; or larger numbers of humans living on less land with fewer premature deaths, including violent ones? But the converse also applies. Can we morally or practically disdain the “social welfare” system of the Plains Indians, the sculpture and winter clothing of the Eskimos, the music and art of tribal Africans, the navigation skills of the Polynesians, the survival techniques of the Australian Aboriginals, the medical botany of countless tribal peoples, or the many “primitive” methods for resolving disputes without recourse to violence or lawyers? The myths of either primitive or civilized superiority deny the intellectual, psychological, and physiological equality of humankind. In fact, the proponents of the pacified past disclaim the idea that all peoples share a common human nature by denying that all societies are capable of using violence to advance their interests.

  Anthropologists in this century have long argued for the “psychic unity” of humankind; in other words, all members of our species have within rather narrow limits of variation the same basic physiology, psychology, and intellect. This concept does not exclude individual variations in temperament or even the various components of intellect, but finds that such variations have no value in explaining social or cultural differences between groups. It is not accidental that the descendents of illiterate villagers from various “backward” parts of the world, and of a variety of racial backgrounds, have become Nobel Prize-winning scientists, mathematicians, and fiction writers using languages very different from those spoken by their ancestors. Anthropologists have long recognized that the many and profound differences in technology, behavior, political organization, and values found among societies and cultures can be best explained by reference to ecology, history, and other
material and social factors. Thus, with a few rare exceptions, anthropologists argue with one another only about the relative importance of these nongenetic factors in explaining cultural variety and cultural evolution. This attitude reflects not just the antiracist tenor of the twentieth century, but also the accumulated facts and especially the experiences of ethnographers. Human psychic unity is not just a theory but a fact, one that can be demonstrated even in a survey of so dark a topic as war. The fact that despite our universal distaste we do “arrive where we started”—that is, at the blunt ugliness of war—unfortunately represents one of the clearest expressions of our shared psychology. Our common humanity, viewed realistically, can be as much a source of despair as hope.

  If war has always been horrible and seldom rare, what lessons, if any, can anthropology offer us in our pursuit of a more peaceful future? Some of the points raised in this work could be very useful, even if they do not suggest easy or comfortable prescriptions.

  First, we should consider trade as an especially productive source of violent conflicts and treat our closest trading partners with special care. Allowing other societies arbitrarily to monopolize the production of some goods that we could produce ourselves may be a good way to foster and maintain peace; attacking such monopolies by self-production is likely to lead to trouble. In the absence of international trade tribunals with the power to enforce their decisions, a compromising approach to trade disputes seems highly recommended. The attitude that “business is war,” often attributed to the Japanese, is exceptionally ignorant, encourages ruthlessness, and makes a habit of tickling the dragon’s tail by inciting and exacerbating trade grievances. The consequences of business, trade, and exchange may include penury and unemployment; but the consequences of war, even for the victors, are death, wounds, and destruction and, for the losers, the very depths of human misery. Mistaking trade for war seems an excellent way of learning firsthand the awful differences between them.

  Second, in our vain pursuit of military security, we should concentrate on economic and peaceful technological development rather than strictly military techniques and weapons. The former advantages can be rapidly transformed, via logistic superiority, into military advantages, whereas superior weapons and military techniques cannot make up for deficient logistics and economic infrastructures. The role played by Detroit in World War II, when all the Allied armies (including the Soviet one) rode to victory on American trucks, and the importance of Silicon Valley to the Allied victory in the Gulf War are just two modern examples. We have repeated observed in this study that military techniques and technology are heavily dependent on peaceful technology and social and economic organization. To feed the parasite at the expense of the host only weakens both.

  Third, we should strive to create the largest social, economic, and political units possible, ideally one encompassing the whole world, radier than allowing those we do have to fragment into mutually hostile ethnic or tribal enclaves. The degree of mutual interdependence created by modern transportation and communications long ago rendered the concepts of national and ethnic self-sufficiency and self-determination absurd and dangerous delusions. The inter-ethnic violence and general suffering unleashed by the breakup of the central political institutions in the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Somalia are almost perfect illustrations of this point. As with imperialism, the mere maintenance of domestic peace cannot be an excuse for totalitarian tyranny, disastrous economic policies, or state imposition of cultural or religious uniformity, since many states of more equitable, prosperous, and tolerant character are just as internally peaceful. It is very instructive to compare Spain’s peaceful conversion from totalitarian tyranny to federal democracy, despite regional and ethnic antagonisms as virulent as any in Europe, with the violent lunacy unleashed a few years later in Yugoslavia and Somalia. In Spain, the institution of a central state and many of its basic components were preserved through the transition; in Yugoslavia and Somalia, they disintegrated. The antidote to war is an effective political organization with legislative, judicial, and police powers, whether its scale comprises a family band, a village, a tribe, a chiefdom, a city-state, a nation, or the whole earth. Obviously, the larger the scale and the longer the life span of any such political organization, the more general and enduring is the extent of peace. However, prehistory, history, and ethnography also indicate that there are many possible political organizations and that the decision about which is the best is on extremely complicated one to make.

  The final lesson of this survey is the crucial importance of the physical circumstantial evidence produced and interpreted by archaeologists. In our legal system, circumstantial evidence is treated with a statutory reserve, although all law-enforcement and legal professionals know that it is actually eyewitness testimony that is notoriously unreliable and contradictory. In real life, the eyewitness accounts of untrained observers, like verbal contracts, aren’t “worth the paper [they’re] written on.” As all scientists know, all of the most fundamental and useful truths science has uncovered about the universe and its mechanisms have been inferred from and confirmed by purely circumstantial evidence. For example, many people have seen ghosts, but no one has ever seen an electron or a gravitational field. Yet most of us are very dubious about the existence of the former, and we are certain enough of electrons and gravitational fields to stake our lives on technology premised on their existence. Until humans traveled into the upper atmosphere and outer space, there were no eyewitnesses to attest to the reality of such long-accepted but only circumstantially evidenced phenomena as the Gulf Stream, limited atmosphere, cyclonic tropical storms, the shape of the continents, and even the sphericity of the earth and moon. Contrary to legal statute, as evidence of “what really happens,” physical circumstance is far superior to standard eyewitnesses (who could, for example, honestly proclaim the earth flat) and expert opinion (invariably contradictory). The very physicality of circumstantial evidence, while it may be and often is misinterpreted, makes it immune to dismissal and resistant to distortion.

  It is certainly difficult to bowdlerize or dismiss an arrow point embedded in a victim’s spine, although anyone can glibly argue that any witnesses to the homicide are liars or deluded. The circumstantial evidence of archaeology is, after written records exist, an essential corrective and complement to history. Using a modern historical example, military historians have been arguing for over a century about what happened to Custer’s annihilated third of the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Bighorn. Since 1876, it has been fashionable for Euro-American historians to discount or dismiss the testimony of Native American eyewitnesses to Custer’s destruction. Most historians have been content to ignore the accounts of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors who fought against Custer and the few Crow Scouts who saw the Last Stand from a distance after being released by Custer (apparently because they advised him against attacking). The contentious historians have preferred their own reconstructions of how Custer should have behaved based on their assessments of his personality and military skill, as well as their own inferences based on such assumptions and the second-or third-hand accounts of survivors from the Reno-Benteen unit. But recently archaeologists, using only circumstantial evidence, have resolved several of the key issues concerning the Last Stand. These resolutions include determining that although the army had no repeating rifles, the Indians had many and used them decisively in repulsing Custer’s initial thrust; that Custer’s command was not suddenly overwhelmed by superior numbers, but had time to organize a defensive formation; and that the Seventh Cavalry’s dead were horribly mutilated.3 While the long-despised Native American eyewitness accounts appeared typically distorted and fragmentary, most of them, whether from hostile or allied Indians, generally conformed to the events reconstructed by the archaeologists.

  The moral of this story is that historical records are usually biased and then subject to every whim and rhetorical device of historians. In the end, it was only the pedestrian empiricism of some
archaeologists, analyzing the rifle shells and reconstructing the shattered skulls left behind on that fateful June 25, that restored to the Native American participants respect for their veracity. Only archaeology compels us to regard the Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow, and Arikawa men and women who left behind personal accounts of that terrible event as the equals of America’s most celebrated writers of diaries and memoirs of the Civil, Second World, and Vietnam wars—that is, as human beings like ourselves caught up in traumatic events.

  It will always be easy to claim that historical accounts are essentially false—for instance, that Celtic hill-forts were only status symbols that Julius Caesar portrayed as real fortifications to enhance his military reputation, that historical first-contact or ethnographers’ reports are merely biased records of disturbed situations, that the red color of watermelon flesh was created by the knife. Fortunately, archaeology is able to look inside the watermelon before it was cut and give the lie to such sophistries. Before civilization and the written records it produces, archaeologists’ circumstantial evidence is all that we can ever know of the deeper human past. It is a shame that archaeologists have given so little thought to prehistoric violence and warfare while quietly recording its effects. What is even more disappointing is that this inattentiveness has obscured the fact that some prehistoric regions and periods were remarkably peaceful over many generations. Any lessons that these ancient peaces might hold for us still await the analysis of contrasting them with more violent places and periods. In the present intellectual climate, such comparisons depend first on a recognition by anthropologists that warfare both was common and had important effects in prehistory.