some other data for safekeeping #1
This place may very likely turn into nothing more than my "excerpt granary." But I'm sure I can find some argument for the utility of such a granary...
There is still a propensity to forget the enormous scope of primitive warfare. The following just serves as my own reminder. Lawrence H. Keeley wrote War Before Civilization, and the samples that Wade cites certainly pique my interest. Unfortunately I doubt I will have the time to read it (in light of all other goals/objectives).
A propensity for warfare is prominent among the suite of behaviors that people and chimpanzees have inherited from their joint ancestor. The savagery of wars between modern states has produced unparalleled carnage. Yet the common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent. As far as human nature is concerned, people of early societies seem to have been considerably more warlike than are people today. In fact, over the course of the last 50,000 years, the human propensity for warfare has probably been considerably attenuated.
“Peaceful pre-state societies were very rare; warfare between them was very frequent, and most adult men in such groups saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime,” writes Lawrence H. Keeley, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Primitive warfare was conducted not by arrays of troops on a formal battlefield, in the western style, but by raids, ambushes and surprise attacks. The numbers killed in each raid might be small, but because warfare was incessant, the casualties far exceeded the losses of state societies when measured as a percentage of population. “In fact, primitive warfare was much more deadly than that conducted between civilized states because of the greater frequency of combat and the more merciless way it was conducted. Primitive war was very efficient at inflicting damage through the destruction of property, especially means of production and shelter, and inducing terror by frequently visiting sudden death and mutilating its victims.”
Keeley’s conclusions are drawn from the archaeological evidence of the past, including the Upper Paleolithic period, and from anthropological studies of primitive peoples. These include three groups of foragers that survived until recent times-the !Kung San, Eskimos and Australian aborigines-as well as tribal farmers such the Yanomamo of Brazil and the pig and yam cultivating societies of New Guinea.
To minimize risk, primitive societies chose tactics like the ambush and the dawn raid. Even so, their casualty rates were enormous, not least because they did not take prisoners. That policy was compatible with their usual strategic goal: to exterminate the opponent’s society. Captured warriors were killed on the spot, except in the case of the Iroquois, who took captives home to torture them before death, and certain tribes in Colombia, who liked to fatten prisoners before eating them.
Warfare was a routine occupation of primitive societies. Some 65% were at war continuously, according to Keeley’s estimate, and 87% fought more than once a year. A typical tribal society lost about 0.5% of its population in combat each year, Keeley found. Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century, its war deaths would have totaled two billion people.*
On the infrequent occasions when primitive societies fought pitched battles, casualty rates of 30% or so seem to have been the rule. A Mojave Indian war party was expected to lose 30% of its warriors in an average battle. In a battle in New Guinea, the Mae Enga tribe took a 40% loss. At Gettysburg, by comparison, the Union side lost 21%, the Confederates 30%.
An archaeologist, Steven LeBlanc of Harvard University, recently reached similar conclusions to Keeley after an independent study. "We need to recognize and accept the idea of nonpeaceful past for the entire time of human existence," he writes. "Though there were certainly times and places during which peace prevailed, overall, such interludes seem to have been short-lived and infrequent.... To understand much of today's war, we must see it as a common and almost universal human behavior that has been with us as we went from ape to human.
Primitive warriors were highly proficient soldiers, Keeley notes. When they met the troops of civilized societies in open battle, they regularly defeated them despite the vast disparity in weaponry. In the Indian wars, the U.S. Army "usually suffered severe defeats" when caught in the open, such as by the Seminoles in 1834, and at the battle of Little Bighorn. In 1879 the British army in South Africa, equipped with artillery and Gatling guns was convincingly defeated by Zulu armed mostly with spears and ox-hide shields at the battles of Isandlwana, Myer’s Drift and Hlobane. The French were seen off by the Tuareg of the Sahara in the 1890s. The state armies prevailed in the end only through large manpower and attritional campaigns not by any superior fighting skill.
How did the warriors of primitive societies get to be so extraordinarily good at their craft? By constant practice during some 50,000 years of unrestrained campaigning. Even in the harshest possible environments, where it was struggle enough just to keep alive, primitive societies still pursued the more overriding goal of killing one another. The anthropologist Ernest Burch made a careful study of warfare among the Eskimos of northwest Alaska. He learned, LeBlanc reports, "that coastal and inland villages were often located with defense in mind--on a spit of land, or adjacent to thick willows, which provided a barrier to attackers. Tunnels were sometimes dug between houses so people could escape surprise raids. Dogs played an important role as sentinels. The goal in all warfare among these Eskimos was annihilation, Burch reported, and women and children were normally not spared, nor were prisoners taken, except to be killed later. Burning logs and bark were thrown into houses to set them on fire and to force the inhabitants out, where they could be killed. Burch's study reveals that the surprise dawn raid was the typical and preferred war tactic, but open battles did occur."
Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies. "While my purpose here is not to rail against my colleagues, it is impossible to ignore the fact that academia has missed what I consider to be some of the essence of human history," writes LeBlanc. "I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially 'pacified the past' and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare," says Keeley.
Keeley suggests that warfare and conquest fell out of favor as subjects of academic study after Europeans' experiences of the Nazis, who treated them, also in the name of might makes right, as badly as they were accustomed to treating their colonial subjects. Be that as it may, there does seem a certain reluctance among archaeologists to recognize the full extent of ancient warfare. Keeley reports that his grant application to study a nine-foot-deep Neolithic ditch and palisade was rejected until he changed his description of the structure of "fortification" to "enclosure." Most archaeologists, says LeBlanc, ignored the fortifications around Mayan cities and viewed the Mayan elite as peaceful priests. But over the last 20 years Mayan records have been deciphered. Contrary to archaeologists' wishful thinking, they show the allegedly peaceful elite was heavily into war, conquest and the sanguinary sacrifice of beaten opponents.
Archaeologists have described caches of large round stones as being designed for use in boiling water, ignoring the commonsense possibility that they were slingshots. When spears, swords, shields, parts of a chariot and a male corpse dressed in armor emerged from a burial, archaeologists asserted that these were status symbols and not, heaven forbid, weapons for actual military use. The large number of copper and bronze axes found in Late Neolithic and Bronze Age burials were held to be not battle axes but a form of money. The spectacularly intact 5,000-year-old man discovered in a melting glacier in 1991, named Ötzi by researchers, carried just such a copper axe. He was found, Keeley writes dryly, "with one of these moneys mischievously hafted as an ax. He also had with him a dagger, a bow, and some arrows; presumably these were his small change."
Despite the fact that the deceased was armed to the teeth, archaeologists and anthropologists speculated that he was a shepherd who had fallen asleep and frozen peacefully to death in a sudden snowstorm, or maybe that he was a trader crossing the Alps on business. Such ideas were laid to rest when an X-ray eventually revealed an arrowhead in the armed man's chest. “In spite of a growing willingness among many anthropologists in recent years to accept the idea that the past was not peaceful,” LeBlanc comments, “a lingering desire to sanitize and ignore warfare still exists within the field. Naturally the public absorbs this scholarly bias, and the myth of a peaceful past continues."
Wade, Nicholas. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. pg 150-4.
*I note that current estimates for 20th Century wartime casualties are about 160 million people.
My only point of criticism is Keeley's use of the terms including means of production, shelter, and property. I think that kind of terminology forces an interpretive paradigm that just doesn't suit the time period. Those terms he uses are really a "farmer's" terms (Since farming requires an actual and significant investment in property, shelter, etc.). Do--or could-- those terms also make sense in the hunter-gatherer-cultivator world?
There is still a propensity to forget the enormous scope of primitive warfare. The following just serves as my own reminder. Lawrence H. Keeley wrote War Before Civilization, and the samples that Wade cites certainly pique my interest. Unfortunately I doubt I will have the time to read it (in light of all other goals/objectives).
A propensity for warfare is prominent among the suite of behaviors that people and chimpanzees have inherited from their joint ancestor. The savagery of wars between modern states has produced unparalleled carnage. Yet the common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent. As far as human nature is concerned, people of early societies seem to have been considerably more warlike than are people today. In fact, over the course of the last 50,000 years, the human propensity for warfare has probably been considerably attenuated.
“Peaceful pre-state societies were very rare; warfare between them was very frequent, and most adult men in such groups saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime,” writes Lawrence H. Keeley, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Primitive warfare was conducted not by arrays of troops on a formal battlefield, in the western style, but by raids, ambushes and surprise attacks. The numbers killed in each raid might be small, but because warfare was incessant, the casualties far exceeded the losses of state societies when measured as a percentage of population. “In fact, primitive warfare was much more deadly than that conducted between civilized states because of the greater frequency of combat and the more merciless way it was conducted. Primitive war was very efficient at inflicting damage through the destruction of property, especially means of production and shelter, and inducing terror by frequently visiting sudden death and mutilating its victims.”
Keeley’s conclusions are drawn from the archaeological evidence of the past, including the Upper Paleolithic period, and from anthropological studies of primitive peoples. These include three groups of foragers that survived until recent times-the !Kung San, Eskimos and Australian aborigines-as well as tribal farmers such the Yanomamo of Brazil and the pig and yam cultivating societies of New Guinea.
To minimize risk, primitive societies chose tactics like the ambush and the dawn raid. Even so, their casualty rates were enormous, not least because they did not take prisoners. That policy was compatible with their usual strategic goal: to exterminate the opponent’s society. Captured warriors were killed on the spot, except in the case of the Iroquois, who took captives home to torture them before death, and certain tribes in Colombia, who liked to fatten prisoners before eating them.
Warfare was a routine occupation of primitive societies. Some 65% were at war continuously, according to Keeley’s estimate, and 87% fought more than once a year. A typical tribal society lost about 0.5% of its population in combat each year, Keeley found. Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century, its war deaths would have totaled two billion people.*
On the infrequent occasions when primitive societies fought pitched battles, casualty rates of 30% or so seem to have been the rule. A Mojave Indian war party was expected to lose 30% of its warriors in an average battle. In a battle in New Guinea, the Mae Enga tribe took a 40% loss. At Gettysburg, by comparison, the Union side lost 21%, the Confederates 30%.
An archaeologist, Steven LeBlanc of Harvard University, recently reached similar conclusions to Keeley after an independent study. "We need to recognize and accept the idea of nonpeaceful past for the entire time of human existence," he writes. "Though there were certainly times and places during which peace prevailed, overall, such interludes seem to have been short-lived and infrequent.... To understand much of today's war, we must see it as a common and almost universal human behavior that has been with us as we went from ape to human.
Primitive warriors were highly proficient soldiers, Keeley notes. When they met the troops of civilized societies in open battle, they regularly defeated them despite the vast disparity in weaponry. In the Indian wars, the U.S. Army "usually suffered severe defeats" when caught in the open, such as by the Seminoles in 1834, and at the battle of Little Bighorn. In 1879 the British army in South Africa, equipped with artillery and Gatling guns was convincingly defeated by Zulu armed mostly with spears and ox-hide shields at the battles of Isandlwana, Myer’s Drift and Hlobane. The French were seen off by the Tuareg of the Sahara in the 1890s. The state armies prevailed in the end only through large manpower and attritional campaigns not by any superior fighting skill.
How did the warriors of primitive societies get to be so extraordinarily good at their craft? By constant practice during some 50,000 years of unrestrained campaigning. Even in the harshest possible environments, where it was struggle enough just to keep alive, primitive societies still pursued the more overriding goal of killing one another. The anthropologist Ernest Burch made a careful study of warfare among the Eskimos of northwest Alaska. He learned, LeBlanc reports, "that coastal and inland villages were often located with defense in mind--on a spit of land, or adjacent to thick willows, which provided a barrier to attackers. Tunnels were sometimes dug between houses so people could escape surprise raids. Dogs played an important role as sentinels. The goal in all warfare among these Eskimos was annihilation, Burch reported, and women and children were normally not spared, nor were prisoners taken, except to be killed later. Burning logs and bark were thrown into houses to set them on fire and to force the inhabitants out, where they could be killed. Burch's study reveals that the surprise dawn raid was the typical and preferred war tactic, but open battles did occur."
Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies. "While my purpose here is not to rail against my colleagues, it is impossible to ignore the fact that academia has missed what I consider to be some of the essence of human history," writes LeBlanc. "I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially 'pacified the past' and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare," says Keeley.
Keeley suggests that warfare and conquest fell out of favor as subjects of academic study after Europeans' experiences of the Nazis, who treated them, also in the name of might makes right, as badly as they were accustomed to treating their colonial subjects. Be that as it may, there does seem a certain reluctance among archaeologists to recognize the full extent of ancient warfare. Keeley reports that his grant application to study a nine-foot-deep Neolithic ditch and palisade was rejected until he changed his description of the structure of "fortification" to "enclosure." Most archaeologists, says LeBlanc, ignored the fortifications around Mayan cities and viewed the Mayan elite as peaceful priests. But over the last 20 years Mayan records have been deciphered. Contrary to archaeologists' wishful thinking, they show the allegedly peaceful elite was heavily into war, conquest and the sanguinary sacrifice of beaten opponents.
Archaeologists have described caches of large round stones as being designed for use in boiling water, ignoring the commonsense possibility that they were slingshots. When spears, swords, shields, parts of a chariot and a male corpse dressed in armor emerged from a burial, archaeologists asserted that these were status symbols and not, heaven forbid, weapons for actual military use. The large number of copper and bronze axes found in Late Neolithic and Bronze Age burials were held to be not battle axes but a form of money. The spectacularly intact 5,000-year-old man discovered in a melting glacier in 1991, named Ötzi by researchers, carried just such a copper axe. He was found, Keeley writes dryly, "with one of these moneys mischievously hafted as an ax. He also had with him a dagger, a bow, and some arrows; presumably these were his small change."
Despite the fact that the deceased was armed to the teeth, archaeologists and anthropologists speculated that he was a shepherd who had fallen asleep and frozen peacefully to death in a sudden snowstorm, or maybe that he was a trader crossing the Alps on business. Such ideas were laid to rest when an X-ray eventually revealed an arrowhead in the armed man's chest. “In spite of a growing willingness among many anthropologists in recent years to accept the idea that the past was not peaceful,” LeBlanc comments, “a lingering desire to sanitize and ignore warfare still exists within the field. Naturally the public absorbs this scholarly bias, and the myth of a peaceful past continues."
Wade, Nicholas. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. pg 150-4.
*I note that current estimates for 20th Century wartime casualties are about 160 million people.
My only point of criticism is Keeley's use of the terms including means of production, shelter, and property. I think that kind of terminology forces an interpretive paradigm that just doesn't suit the time period. Those terms he uses are really a "farmer's" terms (Since farming requires an actual and significant investment in property, shelter, etc.). Do--or could-- those terms also make sense in the hunter-gatherer-cultivator world?