I recommend this study of warfare in prehistoric societies, based on archaeological work and comparisons with anthropological studies of non-state (tribal and hunter-gatherer) societies. When Keeley began his work, his field was dominated by a kind of “neo-Rousseau-an” orthodoxy that in prehistoric societies without centralized states, warfare was unimportant, trivial in its effects, and, if extant, more ritual than in earnest. This orthodoxy was not based on anything more substantial than wishful thinking. Even when it held sway, the weight of archaelogical and anthropological evidence contradicted it. But it was so strong a notion that Keeley could not get a grant to study prehistoric fortresses, with clearly evident moats, pallisades, and skeletons of battle victims, until he renamed them “enclosures”.
Keeley’s work was part of a movement to question some of the more naive notions about prehistory and anthropology that had fixed themselves in the liturgy after World War II. We like to imagine that somewhere, somewhen, people lived in a paradisical state of peacefulness and serene “one-ness with nature”. This dream is used to provide a contrast to the perceived faults of “us and now”. When this kind of myth-making occurs, objectivity usually goes out the window. The truth, which is hard for many to face up to, is that modern industrial societies tend to be less violent, both in terms of death by warfare and in terms of personal crime and murder, than any traditional society in prehistory, recorded history, or in the remote areas studied by social anthropologists. The evidence for this has always been there. It has simply been ignored. Peace and harmony are something we will have to build, by looking into the future. It isn’t in the past. The tools for it are available to us, if we use courage to face facts, and reason to change our bad habits.
Keeley also dispels the notion that non-state warfare is tactically deficient, strategically inefficient, or carried out for strictly symbolic reasons. When ancient humans clubbed each on the heads or skewered each other with spears, they probably did it for exactly the same reasons that modern humans lob hand grenades and fire Exocet missiles.
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