War Before Civilization Read online

  WAR Before Civilization

  WAR Before Civilization

  Lawrence H. Keeley

  Oxford University Press

  Oxford New York

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  Copyright © 1996 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

  First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 1996

  First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1997

  Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Keeley, Lawrence H.

  War before civilization / Lawrence H. Keeley.

  p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13 978-0-19-51 1912-I (Pbk.)

  1. Warfare, Prehistoric. 2. Fortification, Prehistoric.

  3. Weapons, Prehistoric. I. Title.

  GN799.W26K44 1996

  355′.009’01—dc20 94-8998

  10 9 8

  Primed in the United States of America

  To my mother, Ruth; my son, Pete;

  and the memory of my father, Lawrence

  PREFACE

  This book had its genesis in two personal failures—one of a practical academic sort, the other intellectual. As a result of these, I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially “pacified the past” and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare.

  My practical failure involved two unsuccessful research proposals requesting funds to investigate the functions of recently discovered fortification surrounding some Early Neolithic (ca. 5000 B.C.) villages in northeastern Belgium. Such sites represented the settlements of the first farmers to colonize central and northwestern Europe. These two proposals to the U.S. National Science Foundation (which had supported my previous research) requested funds to excavate several Early Neolithic village sites near to the already excavated “frontier” site of Darion. My Belgian colleague, Daniel Cahen, had found that Darion had been surrounded by an obvious fortification consisting of a 9-foot-deep ditch backed by a palisade. My research proposal claimed that Darion’s defenses indicated that this Neolithic frontier was a hostile one and predicted that excavations at nearby sites would reveal similar fortifications. The archaeologists who reviewed these proposals could not accept the defensive nature of the Darion “enclosure” and therefore could not recommend funding a project predicated on what they regarded as an erroneous interpretation. A third proposal was successful only after I rewrote it to be neutral about the function of the Darion ditch-palisade, which was referred to as an “enclosure” rather than as a fortification. In other words, only when the proposal was cleansed of references to that archaeological anathema, warfare, was it acceptable to my colleagues.

  With our new funding, our excavations at four other Early Neolithic sites soon documented that two of them had also been fortified. We had been right after all: on the Early Neolithic frontier, at least when it reached Belguim, fortified villages were rather common; one just had to know how to look for them. Despite having normally inflated academic egos, Daniel and I were shocked by this vindication. I recall that as we drove home on the day our excavations at the site of Waremme-Longchamps had revealed a deep ditch and palisade, our conversation was very limited. It consisted of a stunned silence periodically punctuated by one or the other of us stating in an amazed tone, “We have a ditch and palisade!” Our mutal amazement was based on the prejudices we shared with the very colleagues who had given my early, unsuccessful proposals a skeptical review. Subconsciously, we had not really believed our own arguments: we, too, had assumed that Darion’s fortifications were an aberration and had used them only as an excuse to satisfy our curiosity about the other sites in its vicinity. This realization about our own expections later led to a series of conversations among Daniel, Anne Cahen-Delhaye (a specialist in later Bronze and Iron Age archaeology), and me about the difficulty archaeologists of our generation had in accepting evidence of prehistoric warfare. Later, reflecting on my own education and career, I realized that I was as guilty as anyone of pacifying the past by ignoring or dismissing evidence of prehistoric warfare—even evidence I had seen with my own eyes.

  My first excavations, as a college freshman, were on a prehistoric “shell-mound” village site on San Francisco Bay, where we uncovered many burials of unequivocal homicide victims. It never occurred to me or my fellow students that the skeletons with embedded projectile points we excavated evidenced a homicide rate that was extraordinarily high. This brutal physical evidence we were uncovering never challenged our acceptance of the traditional view that the native peoples of California had been exceptionally peaceable.

  Even more tellingly, in my senior thesis, I used all the rhetorical tricks I accuse my colleagues of here to deny the obvious importance of warfare in early Mesoamerican civilizations. Since grammar school, I had been fascinated by military history and avidly read every book on the subject I could get my hands on. For my B.A. thesis at the end of the 1960s, I chose a topic—the role of militarism in the rise of Mesoamerican civilizations—that seemed to unite my personal interest in military history with my developing academic interest in prehistory. In fact, it was a final decree of divorce, since I concluded (dutifully following the current consensus of archaeological opinion) that the first civilization in Mesoamerica had developed in especially peaceful circumstances. In other words, I argued that militarism and warfare had no role in the evolution of the Olmec, Teotihuacan, and Classic Maya civilizations and that warfare and soldiers had become important only when these more or less “theocratic” civilizations collapsed.

  A quarter-centry later, it is abundantly clear that this prevailing view was quite wrong. The percentage of violent deaths at the prehistoric California Indian village I had helped excavate has recently been tabulated by my college classmate, Bob Jurmain, and it is at least four times the percentage of violent deaths suffered by inhibitants of the United States and Europe in this bloody century. The Classic Maya city-states, one of the subjects of my senior thesis, clearly were at war very frequently and were ruled by particularly militant kings. Ironically, the archaeological evidence that all was not peaceful in the Mayan realm was readily available when I wrote my senior thesis (gruesome murals at Bonampak, fortifications at Becan and Tikal, countless Mayan depictions of war captives and their armed captors, and so on). But like the archaeologists whose work I relied on, I dismissed this data as either unrepresentative, ambiguous, or insignificant. Only as more and more Mayan hieroglyphic writing has been deciphered during the last decade has archaeological opinion shifted from its erroneous conception of the peaceful Maya.

  Like most archaeologists trained in the postwar period, I emerged from the first stage of my education so inculcated with the assumption that warfare and prehistory did not mix that I was willing to dismiss unambigous physical evidence to the contrary. If my initial lack of success in obtaining funding for my own research made me aware of the predjudices of most of my colleagues, my own reactions and memories stimulatred by my subsequen
t success drove home the fact that I had worn the same blinders.

  A few years later, I learned another important lesson. Archaeological opinion quickly became much more open-minded about the probability of armed conflicts in the Early Neolithic of western Europe. In 1989, when Cahen and I published a report in an international journal on our first full field seasons, the prepublication reviewers (some of whom were almost certainly the same referees who had skeptically reviewed my unsuccessful NSF proposals) were uniformly favorable. This is not to say that these colleagues were completely convinced that the enclosures we had found were fortifications, but, by then, they were more than willing to entertain the possibility. Other information published in the late 1980s was also challenging archaeologists’ bias on this issue. Some German publications during this period documented that Early Neolithic enclosures were actually common—more than fifty enclosed sites had already been discovered during the past fifty years—but these findings had been published in such obscure local journals that they were not widely known. In addition, a very thorough report was published in 1987 (again, in a local journal) on an Early Neolithic mass grave found near Stuttgart that contained the remains of thirty-four men, women, and children killed by blows to the head inflicted by characteristicly Early Neolithic axes. By the beginning of this decade, few Early Neolithic specialists would deny that war existed in what had previously been regarded as a peaceful golden age. The resistance that we archaeologists showed to the notion of prehistoric war, and the ease with which it was overcome when the relevant evidence was recognized, impressed me and convinced me that a book on this subject would be worthwhile. Physical circumstantial evidence has an extraordinary ability to overcome even the most ingrained ideas.

  Indeed, archaeology is a peculiarly robust social science. Like all fields, it has unacknowledged blind spots, unconscious prejudices, and declared theoretical biases; but the extremely physical and material nature of the things it studies provides a constant basis for correcting erroneous intellectual notions. Unlike scholars whose evidence consists of the spoken or written word, archaeologists lack the license to dismiss any facts uncongenial to their prejudices by selective ad hominem skepticism, clever sophistry, or the currently fashionable denial that there is any “real past” (that is, that the past is merely an ideological construction and as many pasts exist as there are conceptions of it). For archaeologists, the human past is unequivocally real: it has mass, solid form, color, and even occasionally odor and flavor. Millions of pieces of it—bones, seeds, stones, metal, and pottery—sit on lab tables and in museum drawers all over the world. The phrase “the weight of evidence” has a literal meaning for archaeologists because their basic evidence is material; and because it is circumstantial, only repeated occurrences of it can be interpreted convincingly. Archaeology is the study of patterns of effects, repetitions of human behaviors that leave enduring marks on the physical world. Warfare—the armed conflict between societies—whether its scale is large or small, is such a pattern and leaves very enduring effects. In this work, I have tried to muster a mass of evidence to convince not just archaeologists and historians but also the educated public that the notion of prehistoric and primitive warfare is not an oxymoron.

  L. H. K.

  Chicago

  May 1994

  Acknowledgments

  This project began when the chairman of my department, Jack Prost, encouraged me in the strongest possible terms to apply for a fellowship at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Institute for the Humanities to write a book on this subject. I was granted the fellowship and enjoyed a year free of teaching and departmental duties in the company of a superb group of scholars: Bruce Calder, Jody Enders, Peter Hale, Mae Henderson, and Jim Schultz from UIC’s departments of history, French, art history, English/African-American studies, and German, respectively. They helped me enlarge my view of my subject, suggested changes in my presentation of material, and raised issues I had not considered. Their good-humored tolerance in debate, devotion to scholarship, and mutual encouragement refuted all of the popular hand-wringing about the state of the humanities in our nation’s universities. I also owe much to the director of the Institute, Gene Ruoff, a distinguished scholar of English Romanticism, for extraordinary encouragement, assistance (yes, even financial!), and astute advice. I am most grateful—both to him for sustaining the Institute administratively and to him and his executive board for accepting a “naive realist” natural scientist into their midst. I hope that this book somehow repays the trouble taken on my behalf by everyone concerned with the UIC’s Institute for the Humanities.

  No one is his or her own best critic. Some friends and colleagues have read partial drafts of this book, offering advice and criticism: Jack Prost, Gene Ruoff, Jim Phillips, Bob Hall, Quentin Calkins, Brian Hayden, and my wife, Lesley. A number of colleagues have also provided information, references, and reprints used in this book: April Sievert, Anne Cahen-Delhaye, Paul-Louis Van Berg, Marcel Otte, Larry Kuznar, David Frayer, Waud Kracke, Nancy Fagin, Ron Weber, Brian Hayden, Polly Wiesner, Doug Bamforth, Bob Jurmain, John Beaton, Tom Hester, Ellen Steinberg, Pat Lyons, Jonathan Haas, Bob Hall, and Jim Phillips. None of these helpful people is responsible for any errors of commission or omission perpetrated by me in this work.

  I would also like to acknowledge the inspiration of several eminent anthropologists, whom I know only from their work but upon whose data and ideas I have especially relied: Andrew Vayda, Robert Carneiro, Mervyn Meggitt, Paula Brown, William Divale, Thomas Gregor, and Robert Edgerton. Their unblinking realism, comparative approaches, and unapologetic rationality are balm indeed in this era of vacuous “notions” and completely subjective “deep readings.” Any future dissertations on this subject must be founded, as was mine, on the work of these extraordinary anthropologists.

  I am most grateful to my editor, David Roll, for finding merit in this work and assisting in its completion. I also appreciate the efforts of Gioia Stevens in seeing it into print.

  The research that provided the germ of this book was conducted in conjunction with my friend and colleague, Daniel Cahen. We are grateful to various ministries of the Belgian government and to the National Science Foundation of the United States for funding our research on the Early Neolithic. Many after-dinner discussions with Daniel and with Anne Cahen-Delhaye helped me define the problem addressed here and understand how pervasive it was. I would treasure our long friendship and their unstinting hospitality even if these had not been so academically productive.

  Last but not least, I thank my wife, Lesley, for her unfailing support of my efforts by reading, exhorting, comforting, and permitting me to neglect my responsibilities as a homeowner, father, and husband. Even more humbling was the the generous and proud response of my son, Pete, who told his friends that the reason I was “always busy” was that I was writing a “big book.” While I was immersed in the most depressing aspects of human behavior, my family served as a constant reminder that the more hopeful and cheerful facets of human existence far outnumber its darker ones.

  CONTENTS

  1. The Pacified Past: The Anthropology of War,

  2. The Dogs of War: The Prevalence and Importance of War,

  3. Policy by Other Means: Tactics and Weapons,

  4. Imitating the Tiger: Forms of Combat,

  5. A Skulking Way of War: Primitive Warriors Versus Civilized Soldiers,

  6. The Harvest of Mars: The Casualties of War,

  7. To the Victor: The Profits and Losses of Primitive War,

  8. Crying Havoc: The Question of Causes,

  9. Bad Neighborhoods: The Contexts for War,

  10. Naked, Poor, and Mangled Peace: Its Desirability and Fragility,

  11. Beating Swords into Metaphors: The Roots of the Pacified Past,

  12. A Trout in the Milk: Discussion and Conclusions,

  Appendix: Tables,

  Notes,

  Bibliography,

  Index,

  WAR Be
fore Civilization

  ONE

  The Pacified Past

  The Anthropology of War

  War has long been a sensational topic. Warfare concentrates and intensifies some of our strongest emotions: courage and fear, resignation and panic, selfishness and self-sacrifice, greed and generosity, patriotism and xenophobia. The stimulus of war has incited human beings to prodigies of ingenuity, improvisation, cooperation, vandalism, and cruelty. It is the riskiest field on which to match wits and luck: no peaceful endeavor can equal its penalties for failure, and few can exceed its rewards for success. It remains the most theatrical of human activities, combining tragedy, high drama, melodrama, spectacle, action, farce, and even low comedy. War displays the human condition in extremes.

  It is thus not surprising that the first recorded histories, the first written accounts of the exploits of mortals, are military histories. The earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs record the victories of Egypt’s first pharoahs, the Scorpion King and Narmer. The first secular literature or history recorded in cuneiform recounts the adventures of the Sumerian warrior-king Gilgamesh. The earliest written parts of the Books of Moses, the “J-strand” (called so because in its passages the name given God is Yahweh or, corruptly, Jehovah), culminate in the brutal Hebrew conquest of Canaan. The earliest annals of the Chinese, Greeks, and Romans are concerned with wars and warrior kings. Most Mayan hieroglyphic texts are devoted to the geneologies, biographies, and military exploits of Mayan kings. The folklore and legends of preliterate cultures, the epic oral traditions that are the precursors to history, are equally bellicose. Indeed, until this century, historiography was dominated by accounts of wars and the political intrigues that led up to them. Because history, strictly speaking, consists of written accounts and because writing is confined to civilized societies, civilized warfare is the subject of a longstanding and voluminous literature. For example, more than 50,000 complete books have been devoted to the American Civil War alone, and scores more are published each year. What the literate world knows as warfare is therefore civilized warfare.