Discussion and Conclusions
What the dead had no speech for, when living
They can tell you, being dead; the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
These favorite lines from an unfavorite poet sum up what this book has been about. The “communications” recorded here from the dead world of prehistory and the recently deceased “primitive” one are indeed eloquent on the subject of war. The burned villages, the arrowheads embedded in bones, the death tolls, and the mutilated corpses speak more truthfully, more passionately on this dismal subject than all the recorded verbiage of the living, which is riddled with cant, sophistry, and flights of fancy. The dead voices heard here tell us that war has an ugly sameness; it is always a compound of crimes no matter what kind of society is involved or when in time it occurs. After exploring war before civilization in search of something less terrible than the wars we know, we merely arrive where we started with an all-too-familiar catalog of deaths, rapes, pillage, destruction, and terror.
This is a brutal reality that modern Westerners seem very loathe to accept. They seem always tempted to flee it by imagining that our world is the best of all possible ones or that life was better when the human world was far simpler. During this century, anthropologists have struggled with such complacent and nostalgic impulses, even in themselves. Their ambition was and is to explore the human condition at all times and in all places, to enlarge the narrow view of it that the written records of civilized life provide and to, in every sense, “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” But these goals and the raw subject matter of anthropology—the origins of humans and their various cultures, social life before cities, states, and historical records—are in every culture but our own the province of mythology. Myths are a consequence of many impulses and serve many purposes, but chief among these are didactic and moralizing ones. Anthropologists would be less than human themselves if they were immune to such impulses, and it is difficult to deny that on the subject of war before civilization they have shown a special susceptibility. After the depressing shocks of two world wars, anthropologists compromised between complacency and nostalgia, Hobbes and Rousseau, by conceiving of primitive war as a sometimes common but unserious and ineffectual activity. A few now seem poised to abandon even this compromise by quietly assuming or boldly declaring that life before civilization was remarkably peaceful. Yet whatever their tendency to mythologize, anthropologists have steadily accumulated observations and physical evidence through their ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork. It is precisely these painfully accumulated facts that prevent anthropology from lapsing into mythology.
The facts recovered by ethnographers and archaeologists indicate unequivocally that primitive and prehistoric warfare was just as terrible and effective as the historic and civilized version. War is hell whether it is fought with wooden spears or napalm. Peaceful prestate societies were very rare; warfare between them was very frequent, and most adult men in such groups saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime. As we have seen, the very deadly raids, ambushes, and surprise attacks on settlements were the forms of combat preferred by tribal warriors to the less deadly but much more complicated battles so important in civilized warfare. 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. The plunder of valuable commodities was common, and primitive warfare was very effective in acquiring additional territory, even if this was a seldom professed goal.
Primitive war was not a puerile or deficient form of warfare, but war reduced to its essentials: killing enemies with a minimum of risk, denying them the means of life via vandalism and theft (even the means of reproduction by the kidnapping of their women and children), terrorizing them into either yielding territory or desisting from their encroachments and aggressions. At the tactical level, primitive warfare and its cousin, guerrilla warfare, have also been superior to the civilized variety. It is civilized warfare that is stylized, ritualized, and relatively less dangerous. When soldiers clash with warriors (or guerrillas), it is precisely these “decorative” civilized tactics and paraphernalia that must be abandoned by the former if they are to defeat the latter. Even such a change may be insufficient, and co-opted native warriors must be substituted for the inadequate soldiers before victory belongs to the latter.
The real weakness of precivilized war making has been at the highest strategic level, rooted in the weaker logistic capacities imposed by small populations, slim economic surpluses, and limited transportation capacities. These true deficiencies, all determined by the social and economic features inherent in tribal life itself, have made it almost impossible for tribal warriors to conduct planned campaigns and prolonged sieges. It was the concentration of resources and power in hierarchical political organizations, the millions of cannon-fodder citizens subject to their disposal, the galleon, compass and sextant, the ox-wagon, steam engine, railroads, and factory production, as well as smallpox, measles, and weeds, that allowed the nations of western Europe to gain ascendancy over the uncivilized world during the past half-millennium. It was not the much discussed and theatrical weaponry, discipline, and tactical techniques that gave soldiers their eventual triumphs, but their mastery of the rather pedestrian arcana of logistics. In modern guerrilla warfare, when superior primitive tactics are wedded to even very limited civilized logistics, more completely civilized adversaries are very commonly discomfited. Guerrilla warfare merely incorporates manpower and supply capacities on a civilized scale and uses more up-to-date weaponry. Primitive warfare is simply total war conducted with very limited means.
The discovery that war is total—that is, between peoples or whole societies, not just the armed forces who represent them—is credited by historians to recent times. Some point to the French Revolution’s “nation in arms” or Napoleon’s aggressive use of it. Against this claim can be posed the doctrines of Jomini, Clausewitz, and (in naval warfare) Mahan, who analyzed the Napoleonic Wars and concluded that the primary objective in warfare should be the destruction of an enemy’s “main force” military units by formal battles, ideally a single decisive trial of strength. Other military historians claim with better justification that the realization of war’s total nature belongs to those peculiarly American military geniuses, Grant and Sherman, who are credited individually or jointly with the awful invention of modern total war. It should be clear from this book that this Western “discovery” is comparable to the European discovery of the Far East, Africa, or the Americas. The East Asians, sub-Saharan Africans, and Native Americans always knew where they were; it was the Europeans who were confused or ignorant. So it is with total war. For millennia, tribal warriors have been conducting smaller-scale and more ruthless versions of Sherman’s march and Grant’s war of attrition by ringing fruit trees, stealing or destroying herds and crops, burning houses and canoes, stealthily slaughtering individuals and small groups, and gradually abrading a foe’s manpower in very frequent but low-casualty battles. Primitive war is “war to the knife,” guerre à l’outrance. War has always been a struggle between peoples, their societies, and their economies, not just warriors, war parties, armies, and navies.
Western nations gradually lost sight of this simple truth over many centuries after the decline of Rome. They more and more preferred to conduct war purely between proportionally smaller forces of specialists—first armored nobility, then mercenaries, and, later, professionals or regulars. They took what had been a nasty free-for-all, often literally a struggle for existence (like that between Rome and Carthage), and turned it into a chess game with highly specialized units, stylized movements, and constrained rules. This chess analogy may be trite, but it is a revealing one for civilized war. For example, the celebrated military historian John Keegan notes that for commanders warfare had changed very little over the 200 years before Waterloo. He employs the chess analogy in noting that despite many changes in technology and the social context of military leadership, the nature of civilized combat was very similar over several centuries. He approves of Wellington’s description of the Battle of Waterloo as “Napoleon just moved forward in the old style and was driven off in the old style.” Yet in his choice of examplars of military leadership, he skips from Alexander the Great (ca. 300 B.C.) to Wellington (ca. A.D. 1800), a “jump” of more than 2,000 years, implying that the rate of evolution in Western military methods was very slow during these two millennia.1 The results of this prolonged stultification or recoil from primitive realism in Western military culture were indecisiveness or stasis in a host of chess-like wars.2 Our modern names for several of these conflicts reflect their indecisiveness: for example, the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, and the Thirty Years’ War. It was only in the outposts, where the victors’ manpower consisted primarily of native levies naturally versed in real war and colonial militias who had relearned it from the natives, that the results were conclusive. While the fighting in the European heartland continued indecisively between A.D. 1500 and 1830, France, Spain, Portugal, and (to a lesser degree) the Netherlands lost great domains beyond Europe in the New World and in parts of Asia.
But does this chess analogy apply to Grant’s repeated tactical defeats by Lee—which culminated in Lee’s, not Grant’s, surrender—or Sherman’s March away from the main Rebel force opposing him? No, Grant and Sherman defied the rules and doctrines of Western civilized warfare. It was not until World War II that the rest of the civilized world followed suit. Indeed, what is submarine warfare at sea or strategic bombing in the air but guerrilla (read “primitive”) warfare by new technological means in new mediums?
When we turn to those old questions of what causes wars and helps maintain peace, we find that primitive societies are essentially similar to civilized ones. As with civilized wars, the motives of primitive participants and the causes of their violent confrontations have often been murky and complex. It seems universal that it is usually an act of violence by one side that precipitates a war and behind such acts are usually disputes of an economic character. The only difference that can be seen in this area between states and nonstates is that the latter never claim or appear to be fighting to subjugate another society—to subordinate an independent population to one group’s central political institutions. Since tribal and band societies lack institutional subordination and have decentralized political systems, their “ignorance” of this motive is hardly surprising.
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.
Whatever their personal biases and favored theories, archaeologists basically and ultimately want to know what happened in the past. The physical circumstantial evidence already available repeatedly attests that what transpired before the evolution of civilized states was often unpleasantly bellicose. It also demonstrates that, as with the Native American accounts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, we cannot summarily dismiss the ethnographic reports that give the same message. As Thoreau said, when he suspected his milkman of watering the milk, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” This book has been an extended exercise in finding the trout in the milk.