We have looked at the skeletal evidence for injury in Chapters 6 and 7, but only in the context of interpersonal violence. This chapter moves from ice pick to pike, from the singular to the communal – when violence ceases to be about a single person or a small group of people and becomes a society-wide conflagration. There is certainly more than enough evidence to go around proving that humans are red in tooth and claw, but can we confidently say that war itself is a ‘disease of civilisation’, or linked to the rise of cities? Archaeology suffers from trends in the same way that all human creations do, and the idea of Homo sapiens as the weapon-wielding ape has a long antiquity and a great deal of cultural cachet. In the iconic opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s the image of an ape brandishing a femur as a weapon that presages our species’ descent into violence. Were alien ethnographers to drop from the sky into the modern world, they would be confronted by the constant material culture of militarism: generals and admirals immortalised in bronze, triumphal arches and ritual tombs, or museums full of gaudy-coloured battle scenes and racks and racks of rusting swords.1 But these are the memorials and material culture of a world fully enmeshed in nation-state politics. What about the time before? When there were no cities, with their complicated hierarchies and endless capacity for consuming the labour and resources of the territory around them?
Until the mass casualties of the world wars of the first part of the twentieth century, ‘savages’ were thought to be just that – savage. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when people were conveniently writing in European languages that still get taught in schools about the nature of war, the Enlightenment had by and large delivered. Civilisation was reaching an apogee from which it could never be torn down, so, as you can imagine, the twentieth century came as something of a shock to the system. And in the aftermath of truly global war, a tendency to look at the past through rosy glasses emerged in archaeological theory. A quick trip through of the fluffier bits of the internet reveals that this was not a phenomenon restricted to the social sciences, but a larger cultural meme. According to a certain school of thought, popular in many California parks and university campuses in the 1960s, there existed before the world of cities2 a sort of perfect state of child-like innocence, as typified by the imagined lives of pre-colonial Native Americans. The inconvenient social complexity and capacity for ecological destruction of these actual groups of actual humans got lost in a dreamy, infantilising narrative, full of praise for a pacifistic wisdom and perceived harmony of indigenous existence prior to European contact. While many Native American groups in the modern era did and do hold pacifist ideals, such as the Hopi, who registered their conscientious objection to the US war in Vietnam, many did not; the evidence of the previous two chapters would seem to put this hoary old chestnut to rest.
Violence was a feature of life in the New World just as it was in the Old; in Asia as in Africa as in Australia, on islands, on continents, up mountains and down valleys. The violence under discussion so far, however, has been limited to the violence done against individuals, or, at most, small groups from within a larger pool. It’s probable that not even the floweriest of flower children would deny the tendency of humans to resort to violence when the chips are down. In throwing aside the regimented chains of thousands of years of Abrahamic worldviews and throwing open those doors of perception, the hippies had more or less reinvented the idea of a biblical Garden of Eden.3 In more academic terms, the concept of the world before states, cities and complex societies – in other words, up until the end of the Neolithic and for many areas, well into the Bronze Age – is imagined as the last peaceful moment in our species’ tumultuous history. The western cultures that gave us hippies also gave us radical reinterpretations of the past, and led by the much-maligned4 archaeologist and ethnographer Marija Gimbutas in her work on the Neolithic, imagined a Europe before the Bronze Age ruled over by a peaceful matriarchal society. The Mother Goddess myth struck a chord with many, particularly during the cultural upheavals of the Vietnam War. Decades later, dozens of women – largely affluent, middle-aged and American – made the pilgrimage to supposed sacred sites of this overarching matriarchal power, even if their celebrations of the Mother Goddess raised a few eyebrows5 and caused no little amount of cultural confusion.6 However, it wasn’t just the consciousness-raisers of the Berkeley area who imagined the Neolithic as a world before war. It’s worth asking: can you even have war before you have a big complex state, topped by cities, where kings and bureaucrats can command massive standing armies? Life before the creation of large centralised states – the Romans, the Aztecs, the Han – in what might loosely7 be considered the Metal Ages was a thing of villages and regional exchange networks. Does war only take a village?
It may or may not help to define what is meant by ‘war’ in this discussion, even though it’s a very common word and presumably easily intelligible to any reader with a vocabulary beyond the level of a five-year-old.8 Given that this is a book largely about the past, you will probably also have an accompanying set of mental images, specific to your personal and cultural tastes, perhaps involving medieval knights on horseback, Roman legions or Japanese samurai.9 A standard definition would see war as ‘armed conflict’, but that doesn’t quite capture the role of war in the lives of cities, states and cultures. The eighteenth-to-nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz famously said that war is ‘a continuation of politics10 by other means.’ This is taken to emphasise that war is a political act, by political actors, intent on political outcomes: power over territory, population or other resources. The French social theorist Michel Foucault retorted, some years too late for Clausewitz to benefit from it, that rather, it’s politics that is the continuation of war by other means. This emphasis on politics belies the worlds that both men occupied – big-state societies with big-state actors, writing in a time where the concept of war had been very much codified into the practice we recognise from newsfeeds today. An anthropological consideration of war, however, is a much broader continuum of conflict, ranging from the territorial ragings of primates,11 through the many different modes of community conflict present in hunter-gatherer groups and smaller-scale societies, to the urban worlds Clausewitz and Foucault were considering.
In the mid-1990s Lawrence Keeley published a book that was determined to shake up the notion of a peaceful past among anthropologists, to the same extent that investigating it had shaken him up as a researcher. In the preface to his volume War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Keeley explains his paradigm shift as the result of personal failure: having gone along with the prevalent narrative of a peaceful past for so long, the revelation that the site he was digging was not so much ‘enclosed’ as it was ‘fortified’ came as a considerable surprise. Fortifications imply the presence of something to be fortified against, and cows are not known for their siege tactics. Keeley divided anthropological theorists into Neo-Hobbesian or Neo-Rousseauian camps, with the former seeing war as endemic to the ‘primitive’ condition and the latter arguing the opposite. Both, Keeley argues, treat this kind of community-wide violence as a binary, with ‘primitive conflict’ on the one side of the emergence of states and ‘war’ on the other. In order to accommodate the history of human conflict in the history of human cities, we’d need more flexibility than even the religious symbolism of the Bible can provide.
Our species’ fondness for massacres is of sobering antiquity, and cannot be simply attributed to the rise of cities and the social complexity they embody. Given our long history of violence, it’s worth considering the developmental history of our genocidal – or at least communicidal – tendencies. We know that even our primate relatives the chimpanzees indulge in fatal raids on competing neighbours, and many researchers have argued that the history of human conflict is older even than Homo sapiens themselves, as the evidence from Sima de los Huesos would suggest.
In the complex cave systems underlying those same Atapuerca Mountains where our potential first-known murder victim was found, many more archaeological remains of Europeans from the last million years have been unearthed, including potentially even earlier victims. Far below the surface level at the site of Gran Dolina, excavations uncovered a spectacular find: the remains of 12 individuals dating back to around 850,000 years ago, with distinctive skulls and teeth that led to their description as Homo antecessor. And what remains they were: young men, women and children – mostly children – whose bones had been picked clean. Bioarchaeologists make an effort at distinguishing the normal wear and tear affecting bones that have been buried underground, tumbled through water, leached by acidic soil or otherwise degraded. The study of bone taphonomy is exactly what allowed researchers to identify that these bones were not just artfully tidy – they had been deliberately stripped of meat. From microscopic cut marks that match the stone tool technology of the time to the smashed bits of long bone where all the best marrow could be had, the bones of this hapless lot were treated indistinguishably from the bones of other hominin kills. This was cannibalism, embedded deep in the human story.
Anthropologists once again turned to the demography of the dead for answers, arguing that the ‘kill profile’ of the cannibalised remains didn’t reflect a total massacre of some threatening outgroup, or any of the patterns associated with cannibalism as it has been practised by recent human groups. Instead, they theorised that the preponderance of young in the assemblage was more similar to the kill profile of chimpanzees, which target the very young of nearby groups in situations where territory overlaps and a resource is contested. The cannibalised remains from Atapuerca may be telling a story of rival groups, fighting over access to resources and territory. If they were deliberately killed, and not just eaten, then they may push back our evidence of homicide another few hundred thousand years.
To find out if war – true community-versus-community conflict – existed before cities, we have to examine very carefully two branches of evidence. The first port of call for the archaeological evidence of conflict is the dead. In Chapter 6 we discussed the forensic signs of violence; but here we are taking things up a notch to full-on conflict mode. What is there to distinguish murder from mayhem? How do we recognise the evidence of war? It’s harder than you might think – there are no cenotaphs, no memorial fountains with inscribed names for the vast majority of human history. However, if there is one commodity that war produces in vast numbers, it’s dead bodies. And not just any bodies – bodies with stab wounds, bullet holes, bits blown off, smashed skulls, fractured bones and a hundred horrible things besides. Obviously, war between nations of millions of men armed with high-velocity projectiles looks very different than between groups that number in the hundreds waving clubs. The evidence for both, however, comes down to the same principle: wounded warriors and mass casualties.
The difficult part for the archaeologist is that these pieces of evidence may exist in very different circumstances. Take, for example, a cemetery of 100 burials. A small portion of these burials contains weapons, clear indications of violent symbology, if not actual practice; these are akin to the ‘warrior graves’ that John Robb was talking about in Chapter 6. Do we accord the individuals thus buried the status of ‘warrior’ and assume that the prevalence of weapons is a straightforward measure of how warlike their society was? The classic interpretation of elaborate burials outfitted with all the tools of war was proposed by Paul Treherne in his article ‘The Warrior’s Beauty’: the ritual treatment of the material culture of war implies that conflict itself is highly ritualised. Or perhaps we have a different case – a mass grave. If this mass grave contains the bodies of only men of fighting age, can we assure ourselves that this is clear-cut evidence of conflict, because a normal society is not made up exclusively of young men? It’s at this point that the evidence of bioarchaeology becomes crucial. Weapons do not necessarily a warrior make, and men don’t always die on the battlefield. A cavalry pike through the head, however, is pretty unambiguous, and a pit of 20 skulls with pike wounds, more or less unarguable.
This is the evidence we begin to find scattered through the archaeological record. Much of the earliest period, before sedentary lifestyles come in with the Neolithic, is sparsely represented; whether because we haven’t found the Mesolithic dead yet or because there just weren’t many Mesolithic people around remains unsatisfactorily answered, given that what archaeologists do find tends to be either in areas of modern habitation or unsystematically encountered. Even as we come forward in time, there are very few examples of obvious conflict. With notable exceptions, isolated finds of traumatic violence in the past, like Ötzi, cannot be directly interpreted as evidence of war – they might as easily be signs of interpersonal violence. The notable exceptions are, however, very notable, and they stretch far back into our hunter-gatherer past.
In January of 2016 a truly shocking story appeared in the pages of Nature,12 upending our definitions of war. Nearly 10,000 years ago, on the western shores of Lake Turkana in modern-day Kenya, a small group of foragers – men, women and children – were slaughtered with a combination of arrows, blades and blows. The remains of 27 individuals13 were discovered at the site of Nataruk, haphazardly discarded into the prehistoric lagoon. A team led by anthropologist Marta Mirazon Lahr found that many of the skeletons bore clear evidence of considerable violence: embedded arrowheads, smashed skulls and fractures to the ribs, spine, knees and hands. This was a massacre, a complete eradication of a community of foragers, committed by the only other possible suspects: another group of hunter-gatherers.
A millenia or two later, in Bavaria, the cave site of Ofnet seems to offer a slightly different form of evidence: nests of human skulls. The Mesolithic cave would appear to have been embellished with rather morbid ‘conversation pieces’. The skulls (and just the skulls) of around 34 individuals had been interred in circular pits near the entrance. The majority of the individuals were quite young: 46 per cent were under six years old, and there were more females then males represented. Nine of the heads had clearly been decapitated by hands human enough to hold a blade: the very top vertebrae of the spinal columns were still attached, and the marks where the heads had been severed from the rest of the body were clearly visible on them. The original analysis of the bones in the 1930s found evidence of slashing wounds to the skulls and considerable trauma to the back of the head: the rear of the skulls had been caved in. Thirty heads in a pit, cut up and stove in, seems like pretty damning evidence that Mesolithic Bavaria might have been considerably less welcoming than the modern tourist authorities would have you believe. The damage to the skulls of Ofnet Cave, however, isn’t the smoking spearpoint that archaeologists originally hoped for. Arguments have been made, on re-examination of the archaeology and further radiocarbon dating, that some of the material could have been deposited at different times – and so are not evidence of a battle with mass causalities. That still leaves the five adult individuals in the skull nests that have clear evidence of fatal blows from a ‘chopper’-like tool with considerable explaining to do, but no incontrovertible proof of war.
What evidence we do have of war from the time before cities (and states) seems to fit largely well with the expectations of raiding and conflict over resources that we know from ethnographic literature, where fatalities occur but are not necessarily extended to the entirety of a community; nor are they restricted to just one group of ‘warriors’ – for example, the fallen include women and children as well.14 However, we are increasingly elaborating on the range of violence open to people without the benefit of cities. The Bronze Age of Northern Europe, for instance, is devoid of cities but certainly not of warriors, and new evidence has conclusively demonstrated that these warriors did, in fact, go to war. The Tollensee River in Germany is the location of an impressive recent discovery of some hundred armed men (and five very unlucky horses) gone back to the mud shot full of arrows. These warriors may not have come from a city, but they certainly died for a political entity large and complex enough to compel them to fight, and not just the once: the weapons they bear are bronze and impressive, and their bones show evidence of earlier trauma.
Contesting territory, violently and with fatal consequences, is nothing new. The dawn of agriculture and settled life in many parts of the world sees, if anything, an upswing in community-wide markers of violence. Robb’s work in Italy is not an isolated case. In the canyons of modern-day New Mexico and Colorado in the Southwestern United States, archaeologists have revealed hundreds of bodies under the desiccated remains of burned-out pueblo houses. Bodies of men, women and children show signs of a violent end – cranial trauma, unhealed fractures – before being unceremoniously deposited in a house that was then burned to the ground. Of the 23 bodies found in the collapse debris at the Ancestral Puebloan15 site of Sand Canyon in Colorado, nine had fracture wounds that clearly pointed to violent deaths, and all of those nine had skull fractures. Other sites in the region show similar patterns, leading archaeologists to suggest that the environmental changes occurring in the thirteenth century AD caused sufficient stress in the dispersed Puebloan villages that fatal cross-village raids in these Neolithic cultures for dwindling resources became a major danger. All across North America, where we have a number of groups who transitioned to agricultural life at different times and in different places, the evidence is mounting for a far more violent Neolithic than previously imagined – the bodies are quite literally piling up.
Massacres are, despite the mass casualties, still not quite the same thing as Clausewitz had in mind when he wrote about war. The dead of the Neolithic death pits, like the skulls in Ofnet before them, speak of violent villagers and not professional killers. The startling finds at Nataruk are so far the first conclusive evidence of modern humans massacring an entire community, but it’s difficult to argue that a single incident marks the engagement we know as warfare. The Nataruk may have been defending territory, but they did not hold it, or control the people on it, in the way an urban state does. The Bronze Age villagers who died at Tollensee may well have been contesting territory, with some of the trappings of professional warriors, but they may not have been Tollensee-local at all. There is a suggestion that the fighters may have actually come from further south, where war was a more firmly professionalised occupation. In the end, it’s a bit ridiculous to segregate professional war and continuous or opportunistic raiding as features occurring before or after the advent of some arbitrary civilisational achievement level; it’s equally pointless to try to corral ‘primitive’ war into categories of effectiveness or organisation. Deck chairs have been rearranged to greater benefit. It may be more helpful to try to consider the difference between using violence in short-term acquisitive raids versus towards a goal of political subjugation or control. That’s not to suggest that war, even in16 modern nation-states, isn’t about acquisition of something, but rather to say that the mechanisms for violently achieving those ends can be either opportunistic or built into the architecture of society. The difference between the world of villages in the Neolithic and the more complex urban centres of later periods comes down to evidence of not just malice aforethought, but the threat of malice as a constant thought.
The second piece of evidence for war in the past, which we have finally got to, is the one that set Keeley on the path to re-integrating violence into the human story. And what Keeley discovered wasn’t actually even bodies, it was … ditches. Defensive ditches. The earthwork fortifications of hillforts have been interpreted in a variety of ways, with periods of militarist interpretation followed by alternative explanations emphasising cultural symbolism. Ditches lead to walls, and walls mean that you would very much like an ‘inside’ area to remain separate and distinct from an ‘outside’ area. It also suggests that you have reasons to be wary of things outside that want to get in (or vice versa). This is the sort of planned-for malice that seems to be a feature of the more complex human hubs of the world. It’s the violence aforethought that explains the walls that spring up around villages in early agricultural phases from around the world – from the earthworks of the Longshan culture in China to the fortifying walls (and neat lines of accompanying sling stones) found at coastal Ostra in Peru.
The walls of Jericho, for instance, ring loud in Western ears because of their role in the Old Testament,17 but the very first incarnation of Jericho’s walls, uncovered by the painstakingly systematic work of Kathleen Kenyon, may have been fortifications against a rather more implacable enemy than marauding Israelites. Kenyon, perhaps one of the most fascinating archaeologists to have lived and worked in the twentieth century,18 had something of a habit of bringing a ruthlessly systematic approach to the overly romanticised archaeological sites of the Holy Land. Despite a fondness for leaving enormous baulks of earth for no apparent reason at the neat corners of her trenches, her careful excavation work found that, under the much later Iron Age fortifications, a very early series of walls had encircled the site, topped by a stone-footed tower. Based on the pottery she hazarded that the foundations went back to the Early Bronze Age, a date later confirmed by radiocarbon testing. Careful study suggested that these walls were pitched in such a way as to protect Jericho from flooding, not assault by trumpet. The lookout tower was reinterpreted as a ceremonial hub, and the walls of Jericho fell again to the post-processual forces of archaeological theory.
So, why should it be that when we see a wall around an ancient site, our first thought should be that it was built to keep other people out? If Jericho’s walls were built against the elements, why do we jump so easily to interpret all walls as defensive fortifications? For many archaeologists, even the most fortress-like settlements in Europe – big, mounded escarpments with earth ramparts collectively falling under the heading of ‘hillforts’ – can be seen as more than evidence of warring tribes. Much as temples and ritual centres were a collective project in the very earliest settlements, big walls could also be the ritual focus for group activity and general showing off – something to quite literally rally behind. If Jericho’s walls were for keeping water out, and the hillforts of Iron Age Europe were for keeping cattle in, perhaps the appearance of city walls and other fortifications in human history cannot be immediately interpreted as evidence of increasing conflict.
Not everyone agrees with this. Keeley in particular takes umbrage at the interpretation of walls and earthworks as being symbolic – rather than defensive – in function. The Neolithic period in much of Europe is identified with evidence of the spread of the supposed peaceful communities of the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) cultures, whose distinctive ceramic styles creep into Europe alongside farming and domesticated animals. We’ve seen the progress of farming culture on the radiocarbon maps of the Neolithic Revolution and discussed the population shifts that may have accompanied this transition in Chapter 4 – a case of pots and people. Towards the tail end of the LBK period, around 7,000 years ago, the villages of these early farmers became fortified villages. And over the last few decades, we have begun to accrue evidence that the people of the Neolithic had very good reason for putting up walls.
In the 1980s the discovery of the Talheim ‘death pit’ in Germany was an international sensation. The publication in 1987 of the findings of the archaeological team took everything that had been thought about the sedate, sauntering progress of agriculture (and agriculturalists) through Europe and chucked it out the window. Thirty-four individuals were found bludgeoned to death with LBK chopping tools (axes and adzes) and cast willy-nilly into a pit, discarded human carcasses without normal ritual positioning or accompaniment of grave goods. Just as at Nataruk in Kenya thousands of years earlier, the dead included men, women and children in such a variety to suggest that they might have represented the whole of a village. The crushing injuries that killed them were dealt to the back of the head, suggesting that they had been taken by surprise or otherwise not resisted: there were none of the parry fractures or defensive cuts to the hands or arms that modern forensics would identify as evidence of fighting back. Not long after, nearly 640 kilometres (400 miles) due east, in Austria at the site of Schletz-Asparn near Vienna, a ditch that may have held as many as 300 bodies was partially excavated. Extrapolating from the 60-plus remains analysed, archaeologists identified a massacre nearly identical to the one at Talheim – death by Neolithic axe, and in one case, arrow. In 2015 yet another LBK massacre was discovered at the site of Schöneck-Kilianstädten, 145 kilometres (90 miles) due north of Talheim. Twenty-six people died from a combination of arrow and axe wounds. Their lower legs were smashed in, with a small majority of the individuals showing compound fractures to the tibia (the bone that makes up your shin) that occurred around the time of death.19 In a final new twist, there appear to have been no younger adult females among the dead – they may have been taken captive.
So, we can definitively say that the world before cities had its massacres: community versus community in armed conflict. As populations expanded, so did the opportunities to rack up casualties. The mass deaths described in Germany, Kenya and Austria do not seem to adhere to the ethnographic examples we have from anthropological studies of small-scale warfare – raids that take captives, or at least leave a survivor or two. Massacres seem to occur in specific but variable circumstances: some combination of population pressure possibly accompanied by climate change, and all of a sudden the bottom drops out of your way of life. But, as the litany of depressed cranial fractures from Germany and Austria tell us, these massacres are carried out with the weapons of … agriculture. Adzes and axes are no swords. For all of the death they bring, these inter-village conflicts lack the professional militarism, the special social status, of organised, institutional warfare. Just because you don’t have weapons to hand doesn’t mean you can’t have a genocide: the horror of Rwanda in 1994 was inflicted largely with agricultural tools. When we do see early evidence of conflict using proper weapons like those found at Tollensee, we can’t quite trace back the origins of the warriors, let alone their war, so it’s very hard to argue how integrated they are into the culture of the muddy river valley in which they were found.
Archaeological evidence of ‘warriors’ has been encountered far more often than the skeletal evidence of battle. This might be attributable to the phenomenon John Robb describes, where the prevalence of symbols of war found in burials – axes, shields, chariots, spear heads – does not map onto the evidence for rates of violence revealed by the skeletons within. Keeley considers the interpretation of metal found in elite graves with fancy bronze weapons as merely a form a material wealth as somewhat missing the point. If these symbolic spearheads are commodities – money – then what about old Ötzi the Iceman, who died with a fully hafted example? Were, Keeley quips, his bow, dagger and arrows merely small change?
We now know what Keeley did not in 1996 – Ötzi died a violent death, and his spearhead seems incontrovertibly to be a working weapon. But just because one bronze spearhead is functional doesn’t mean they all are. Out in the far southeast of Turkey, our ongoing20 excavations at Başur Höyük have unearthed spectacular bronze finds. The cemetery that pops mysteriously into existence at the collapse of the first Uruk network holds dozens of elite graves. They are full to the brim of bronze objects: elaborately moulded staff toppers show animals and designs of particular sophistication, personal ornaments like pins, and, unsurprisingly, bronze spearheads. So far, so warrior grave. And they would have pulled off the image of gritty fighting men too, if it hadn’t been for the fact that these spearheads were still in the Bronze Age equivalent of the bubble wrap they came in. Still packaged in delicate traces of fabric wrap ties, job lots of 75 spearheads, mint condition,21 were carefully deposited alongside hundreds of ceramics, thousands of beads and whatever organic goods we have lost to time. After a brief bioarchaeological assessment of the individuals found with these amazing stockpiles of weapons, it seems unlikely that, for instance, the 12-year-old child found among the other bodies in the most elaborate grave would have wielded quite such an arsenal in life.
We know that many of the early urban centres of the world heralded military conquests with elaborate monuments and stelae – written and iconographic celebrations of victorious battle that were integral to their view of themselves.
The famous Stele of the Vultures, currently housed in the Louvre, is such an object, left as a permanent testimony to one of the earliest known organised battles in history, sometime around 2450 BC. It tells of a military victory by Eannatum, leader of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash. The dual carved stone faces contain numerous registers of scenes of battle and eventual victory, but the one that always sticks in my mind is the mound of naked corpses that accompanies the text below, which glorifies in slightly ritualistic tone the ‘multitude22 of corpses’ that will ‘reach the base of heaven’. Lagash itself is one of the very first of the Mesopotamian city-states that appear in the mid-third millennium BC, just after our cemetery up north. The war described on the Stele of the Vultures is the closest thing we have to evidence of the first city-on-city conflict; this is another thing altogether from the village raids or community violence we have discussed previously. If the multitudes described on the Stele are literal, and we take an acceptable casualty level of about one in five (a guestimate frequently employed in premodern warfare), then it implies that the actual size of the enemy army was some 18,000 people. A more reasonable estimate comes from the actual written account of tablets found in Shuruppak dating to around 2600 BC, which notes the number of warriors that the king financed. This earliest of standing armies, it seems, may have only been 600 to 700 strong. Either way, it’s clear that by the time of the Mesopotamian cities, war was an institutionalised practice.
It’s no great surprise that the professionalisation of war through the sponsorship of warriors supported by a hierarchical urban city or city-state leads to the sort of wars Hollywood spends so much money imagining. With the exception of a few modern nation-states, a considerable amount of illustrated matter aimed at young men, and the always excitingly different Scandiweigans,23 the word ‘warrior’ has meant for the most part young-to-middling-aged men. While we discussed in Chapter 1 the hazards of doing demography on dead people, in the case of identifying evidence of war in the past, a pit full of young men with holes in their heads is a pretty incontrovertible bioarchaeological signal that conflict has occurred. What, however, is the reality of this manly conception of war, where it is men who fight and men who die? Is that what really changes, from Neolithic (and earlier) massacres that include all-comers, to the exclusively male carnage of the Somme? It may be that the killers in both cases were young men; it may be that young men in societies past and present, small and large, are frequently gathered in groups and societies for some sort of violent activity – both archaeology and ethnography tell us this. But it certainly cannot be said that the warfare that pits cities against cities or states against states does not result in the death of entire communities and the massacre of truly horrifying numbers of non-combatants – that was the lesson my fourth-grade reading of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes was designed to teach. Can we say that warfare before cities was really that different to what came after, in terms of the people affected?
Cities are the harbingers of complex polities; they are defined by their complexity and are the necessary engines of the state systems that contest territory and power to truly horrific costs. The twentieth century AD saw death on a scale unimaginable (and quite literally impossible) in the twentieth century BC. Individual battles killed over a million people – by some estimates, the same number of humans alive on the planet when the whole Neolithic experiment started. If the mass casualties of the past century are an indication of the destructive power of warfare in an urbanised, hierarchical planet, then perhaps Charlton Heston was right and we really are all maniacs, doomed to war our species to extinction and make way for the peace-loving apes to take pride of place on planet Earth.24 It’s very difficult indeed to imagine a world more prone to war than the one we currently inhabit.
And yet. We can think back to those symbolic warriors, going into their graves with less-dented skulls than their Neolithic counterparts thanks to the diversionary tactic of heavily regimented status hierarchies that make violent competition a bit of a dead end. Even the relentlessly self-promoted violence of the Moche culture of coastal Peru, with its dismemberment-themed pots and artistic depictions of bound and bleeding prisoners and human sacrifice – even they seem to see a fall in numbers of cranial fractures just as the violence in their artwork increases in the run-up to full urban-state society. We can desperately try to avoid picturing the smashed tibias of the men, women and children found in a shabby Neolithic mass grave thousands of miles from the nearest ‘city’. Or we can follow Keeley’s final argument: that it’s civilisation that has pacified us, and cities that have saved us. He suggests that if you were to take even the worst excesses of twentieth-century warfare as a proportion of the people at risk of being killed in wars, the overall risk of death through some form of community-on-community violence is around 0.5 per cent. That works out (in Keeley’s calculations) to more than 1,800,000,000 lives saved in the twentieth century alone, versus the deaths if warfare been conducted the old-fashioned non-urban way. While this seems an extraordinary supposition, a very late-breaking piece of research has confirmed that our species has very much lived up to the violence of our clade. In late September of 2016 a Nature paper described the background level of homicidal violence in mammals and primates – including us – at around 2 per cent, taking into account our social and territorial leanings, which bump you up on the mammal murder scale. Mammals cover a range of greater or lesser homicidal tendencies, and primates in general come out at the dripping-with-blood end. Laying out the story of human killing over time against our primate relations, however, comes up with a pattern that Keeley would recognise. There is a rise in violent human-caused deaths from the Palaeolithic, when we more or less fit the expected mammalian trend, to the absolute peaks of the American continent’s genocides in the period of contact – but a dramatic fall ever after. This collapse in the amount of lethal violence in our species coincides with exactly the set of circumstances Malthus gloomily predicted would be the worst for humans: higher population density. High population densities seem, in the human case, to have a pacifying effect.
By the time we come to armies, however, we have a new set of problems to deal with. Armies – proper, standing armies, not just the conscripted surplus population you can commandeer off the land – are dangerous for more than just the points on their arrows or the flaming balls of pitch in their catapults. Armies may be supposed to march on their stomachs, but the reality of military life in the past is far more like marching while emptying your entire gastric tract. Armies are full of disease, passed rapidly in sub-hygienic conditions between immune systems weakened by travel and combat. As an instrument of state power, they move between urban hubs, taking the diseases of one to the unlucky inhabitants of another, often bringing back entirely new diseases as a souvenir of the experience. At least the threat of armies comes at the speed of a slow march. If you think that urban empires with the population and power to wield 500,000 men in battle 2,500 years ago in the Persian campaigns into Greece was bad, wait till the war that we wage is against death that comes at the speed of a sneeze.
1 And heaven help them if they land in North Korea.
2 And the draft, and polyester, and capitalism, man.
3 Indeed, there is a school of thought that interprets Eve’s apple as a withering indictment of agriculture, and another that reads it as a paean to pest control; the Garden of Eden is the advanced yogi of metaphors.
4 Much of this maligning has the faint whiff of misogyny about it. Many of the now-disproven but at the time paradigm-challenging works by female academics of this period received such an abundance of derision that it has obscured their real contributions; see for example Elaine Morgan of ‘Aquatic Ape’ fame or the early response to Jane Jacobs’ groundbreaking work on cities.
5 Read: topless dancing around the Çatalhöyük mound.
6 Read: the house they rented in the very conservative nearby Turkish village mysteriously burned down.
7 Hey, if you wanted a simple narrative you should have gone with a less complex planet. Blame the Americas for making jewellery and not weapons out of their available metals.
8 Special message to any readers who do not meet this criterion: well done making it past the Marxism jokes.
9 It is the author’s contention that a significant subset of the readership will also include dwarves, elves, orcs, trolls, dragons, hobbits and wizards in this exercise.
10 Also translated as ‘policy’. Translation is difficult.
11 Special mention awarded to the determinedly homicidal chimpanzees here.
12 Official religious text of the modern scientist.
13 Depending on your point of view; the grim discovery of a foetus in situ in the abdominal cavity of one of the women might make 28.
14 This is not to denigrate women’s offensive or defensive capabilities, or to make blanket assumptions about social roles in the past; it is simply less likely that a mixed-age and mixed-sex group would share that specific a social role. I would argue that a society dependent on a child warrior caste is not going to succeed in the long term.
15 A culture perhaps better known by the name the Navajo gave them: the Anasazi.
16 Especially in.
17 And, for a very select few, because of the seminal experimental Dadaist industrial stylings of Cabaret Voltaire’s song ‘Walls of Jericho’.
18 It’s a crowded field. Dame Kathleen Kenyon’s extraordinary person and achievements cannot possibly be covered here, but biographies exist. It is enough to know that she essentially pioneered the unique archaeological skill set of being able to fix a car, operate a camera and rock double denim.
19 One can only hope it was afterwards, but that seems overly charitable.
20 Given the political situation in the current moment, this is a statement more of optimism than fact.
21 Some wear and tear from 5,000 years under the earth, as might be expected.
22 ‘Multitude’ in Sumerian is very specifically 3,600, for reasons that I have never really understood.
23 The portmanteau in which I include all of the countries you think of when I say ‘Viking’.
24 Obviously not. Clear evidence that you should never, ever believe anything Charlton Heston said.